


Paint This Town

by pududoll (aprilclash)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Angst, Breaking Up & Making Up, Childhood Friends, Consensual Sex, Drunk Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Growing Up Together, Homophobia, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Minor Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, Self-Discovery, Unhealthy Relationships, hints of edging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:15:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 53,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26027836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aprilclash/pseuds/pududoll
Summary: “What the fuck,” Lee Donghyuck says, sounding thirty per cent tired and one hundred forty per cent like a nightmare from Mark’s high school days, the one where you find yourself walking around the school alleys completely naked from the waist down, except this is the nightmare where the boy you loved for approximately three years or maybe ten, kissed during prom night and dumped a few months later, wakes up in bed with you and acts like he hates your guts. And he has a mullet.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 358
Kudos: 1428





	1. Purple

**Author's Note:**

> written for the prompt: accidental marriage in vegas
> 
> \- It took me one year and a half to manage to finish this fic so I'm not sure it's very consistent in style/narrative, but it really took long and I'd like to publish it. The fic is already over (mostly? I still have to write the epilogue and do some minor editing) but I felt like it was too long for a one-shot, so I will update it weekly.  
> \- The prompt set this fic in Las Vegas, but please note that I've never been to the US and I'm not Asian-American. I asked irl and twitter friends for feedback for the setting, but there might still be inaccuracies. Also, I'm not a lawyer and I've never married/tried to divorce anyone so I really hope I got the legal part of the whole ordeal right.  
> -Title and the poetry quotes in every chapter are not mine but they come from [this beautiful poem](https://www.instagram.com/p/CBpJG3xFr2o/). I also made a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6fYSdgvpwUPM8ANwkfmckj)  
> to help me write and I'm sharing it if you need an emotional soundtrack.  
> \- Please be mindful of the rating and tags. I would like to specify that in future chapters there will be mentions of Mark having experiences with the kink scene and a scene in which he discusses this with Donghyuck. If you are uncomfortable with any of this content I highly recommend you don't read this. Please make sure you're okay with the content to have a safe reading experience. If this is your cup of tea, I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> quick edit to say i want to thank everyone who read this fic in advance and commented on it, i feel like half of the internet had a link to the gdocs at some point and i don't want to leave anyone out, but i am extremely thankful to all of you for the feedback, for the partial editing when it happened, for the suggestions, even just for screaming at me after reading the draft. the biggest thank you goes to my prompter who waited for literally one year and a half for this and was an actual angel and understood i was going through a rough time, i hope you like it because i struggled so much but i learned so much while writing this fic!
> 
> Translations:  
> \- [Russian](https://ficbook.net/readfic/10141590)  
> \- [Indonesian](wattpad.com/story/249881091)

> _i take beautiful things and petal them apart, forge talons steel-bright to pierce open the sky. deluge holds your history pinned open like vivisection and lavender is a sea-spun wave from the glass that replaced your fear._

Mark wakes up to a pale, lavender ceiling above him and a single blade of light hitting him between his eyes, a candid _coup de grace_ to his dreams. He can taste everything he’s ever eaten in his life on the roof of his mouth and his limbs feel sloshed, jelly, like he’s emptied his whole soul somewhere around only to be left boneless, purposeless, a pulp of human dizziness.

He blinks, and the cold spring sun blinks back at him against the mauve of his closed eyelids, and when he breathes he inhales a whiff of artificially breezy air-freshener. The sheets smell like neutral soap and too many washings. Next to him, someone sniffles and rustles against the blankets.

Oh, Mark realizes. It’s been so long since the last time he had sex that he had forgotten how nice it can feel, to have real blood in your body and not nerve juices, the endless stress for the next case, and caffeine. The other person is warm, head hidden under the pillow to escape the late morning sunlight, his body tangled in the sheets so that the only thing Mark can see is curves - a shoulder, a hip, a toned calf. Mark has a distinct, painful memory of the curve of this person’s ass, pointed upwards against him as its owner bent down to hide his face in the pillow. Mark had cupped it in his hands, digging his thumbs into the plump skin, and glanced appreciatively at the arc of the boy’s back before he spread him out like a feast, his skin dark under the light of the night. It truly had been too long, and Mark can’t even remember most of it. He has flashes, though. His head hurts when they happen.

The boy inhales against the pillow and sighs but makes no other sound. Mark tries to get up without waking up his guest and almost falls when his soles touch the ground. Whoever this boy was, he made Mark feel so good that he can barely walk straight, so he can only stagger tiredly towards the bedside drawer to pick up a few tablets of painkillers from his toiletries bag.

The morning is trying to be quiet, but it’s betrayed by the tired roars of the cars down the streets and the slow whispering of the rain outside. The digital clock on the nightstand tells Mark it’s almost eleven in the morning. In the rooms next to his own, the rest of the legal team must still be sleeping. Yesterday they made plans to eat lunch together, but not breakfast - not when they were all planning to get shitfaced after finally, _finally_ winning the Klint case. At least he got up early, Mark reasons, so he has time to wake up his one night stand and send him off and shower and then come down feeling fresh and relaxed for the first time in the last six months and rub it all in Johnny’s hungover face.

But first, the pain. The pain needs to go.

He fails to swallow the tablet dry, so he ends up using the water purifier to fill a paper cup. He can feel the stranger mumble a complaint at the loud hissing sound of the machine, but Mark chooses to ignore him for the moment. The cold water washes down the pill and its sweet taste. Hopefully, it’ll wash Mark’s pain too.

Now, where’s his phone? He goes back to the bed, pokes around the sheets. The boy has shifted and Mark can see his nape now, and the bleached tips of an absolutely tasteless, ugly mullet. Dear Lord, this boy has a beautiful ass and Mark can feel his moans in his bones if he tries to think about yesterday night, but he _really_ needs to go. Mark doesn’t know how many months it would take for Johnny to stop clowning him if he finds out he spent the night with a boy sporting a bleached mullet.

The smartphone is nowhere to be found, so Mark gives up and starts poking the stranger.

“Hey, hey you,” he calls, receiving in response just a riotous groan. “Come on Sleeping Beauty, you need to wake up. I don’t have all day.”

“-shole,” the boy murmurs, the voice coming out from under the pillow.

“Yes, I’m an asshole, but I have a schedule and you can’t stay.”

He puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder, ready to shake him awake and drag him to the door if needed, and that’s when he sees it. A flash of gold on his ring finger.

Mark’s brain makes a sound that weirdly reminds him of his old laptop shutting itself down as his palm lingers on the boy’s naked shoulder. It is a ring. On his ring finger. (And where else would it be? It’s a ring, after all, says a petulant voice inside his brain.) He follows the curve of the boy’s arms, the softness, not too much muscle there, but the tan of someone who lives under the sun. The boy lets out a faint sigh when Mark’s fingers linger on his wrist, and his whole body tenses - sensitive - but Mark doesn’t care. He frantically turns the guy’s hand towards his face and he sees it, there’s a ring there too.

Flashes, flashes. The champagne, the club, the other champagne, the tequila, the cheap beer and incredibly strong cocktails of the second, no maybe the third place where they went. They kept moving, bar hopping because Johnny knows all the best places in Vegas. Then everything becomes a blur, but Mark remembers ordering more alcohol, laughing, fucking someone’s thighs in some privé, the ultraviolet light making the bleached ends of his hair look like wisteria on acid. White light, red light, purple light, shining on graffiti. A wedding chapel.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. Johnny, he needs Johnny, he realizes. Even if he has to be clowned for life after this, he needs Johnny because Johnny is a shark and he will definitely get Mark out of paying husband support for this mullet-equipped dude with a nice ass. Not gonna happen. Mark is not going to ruin his own career for this.

The stranger stirs and tries to move, but meets the cage of Mark’s knees planted on the bed next to him. He pulls his hand back, yawns against the pillow.

“Stop making a racket,” he says, scratchy from sleep like one of those old records he’d listened to one too many times.

“Oh my god,” Mark says, dumbly, and that does the trick because the stranger jerks, suddenly very much awake, and throws the pillow away to stare right at him. And Mark is ready to tell him, _oh my god, we got married_ , but suddenly it doesn’t matter, none of it matters. Not the ring, not the boy’s messy mullet extensions, nor the creases of the sheets imprinted on his cheek, or the dry traces of eyeliner and mascara that ran on his face yesterday while Mark pounded his ass deep enough to be able to feel the pain himself.

Not Johnny, not Johnny at all. Mark needs to call Jaemin. He needs to call him or Jeno or Renjun and he needs to tell them to come here and take this boy away - from the Vegas bars, from this expensive motel, from the stupid asshole who got shitfaced and married him. What the hell is he doing here, why did no one think of telling Mark to stay the fuck away from him.

The boy’s eyes are wide, he must have recognized Mark from his voice only, but now he’s staring at him like he’s a poisonous snake. Mark sees him unconsciously inching away.

“What the fuck,” Lee Donghyuck says, sounding thirty per cent tired and one hundred forty per cent like a nightmare from Mark’s high school days, the one where you find yourself walking around the school alleys completely naked from the waist down, except this is the nightmare where the boy you loved for approximately three years or maybe ten, kissed during prom night and dumped a few months later, wakes up in bed with you and acts like he hates your guts. And he has a mullet.

“What the fuck,” Donghyuck repeats, pulling the sheets up to cover himself and looking for his clothes strewn across the room. One of his socks is hanging from the bedside lamp. He looks like he regrets getting it there. He looks like he regrets many things about yesterday night. Mark echoes the feeling.

Donghyuck gets up, grimaces from the pain, either in his head or in his ass, maybe both. He’s completely naked and there’s dried come on his thighs and stomach and some of it isn’t his and he probably needs a shower, but he just wears his shirt and his boxers and he’s halfway through his pants when Mark snaps out of his daze.

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Leaving. Now. Immediately. I don’t know what I was thinking yesterday but I shouldn’t be here.”

“Wait,” Mark begs, “you can’t leave.”

Donghyuck ignores him. He puts his shoes on without socks when he fails to see the one hanging from the bedside lamp and grabs his jacket and he’s already at the door, faster than Mark has ever seen him dress up - and Mark has had a lot of chances to see him dress up in the past.

“Don’t go,” Mark repeats. “I think we need to talk about this.”

“I have no time for your existential crisis. It was a great night, let’s do this again never.”

His hand is already on the door handle when Mark tries his last card.

“We got married.”

Donghyuck stops, the door half-open. Mark cannot see him or his face, but he sees the way he looks down, to his hand, the ring on his finger. He stares for what seems a very long time but it’s actually a short moment, then he turns, face angry and soft and so older and so young still.

He looks into Mark’s eyes.

“I want a divorce.” He turns around again, then hesitates. He seems to swim in his leather jacket. He doesn’t look at Mark but he slightly turns his head to the side so that Mark can hear him. His bleached tips are all tangled but he looks, yeah… He looks very yeah and Mark doesn’t know how to describe his feelings.

“You’ll hear from my lawyer soon,” Donghyuck only says, before he slams the door at his back.

**💜**

Mark hears from Donghyuck’s lawyer less than fifteen minutes later, when Johnny stalks inside his room to find him half-naked on the bed in the same position Donghyuck left him as he stormed out.

Johnny objectively looks like shit, like he jumped inside a washing machine and let it spin-dry him for a few hours, and he still smells like vodka, but the fury in his eyes could break bones.

“What the fuck did you do, Mark?”

Mark can only stare, helplessly, trying to put together what just happened, but everything is faint and confused, a kaleidoscope of moments that changes colors every time he blinks.

“I don’t know,” he tries to say, but Johnny slams the door shut making both of them wince in pain as the noise echoes in their empty, sensitive heads, like a bullet bouncing on every single wall of their mind.

“I… I don’t even remember how we met, I don’t remember what we did… I didn’t know it was him in my bed until he turned around, and then I had a ring, and then he had a ring, and now I don’t…”

“Mark,” Johnny says, and Mark feels the need to take a step backwards because he’s quite sure that if Johnny manages to put his hands on him he’ll throttle him for sure. “Mark, I like you. You’re the best junior lawyer this firm has, I recommended you to the higher-ups because I’ve known you for almost a decade and you’re smart, capable and have amazing work ethics. But what the fuck, Mark Lee, you had one job. Stay the fuck away from Taeyong’s brother. And what the hell did you do?”

Mark looks down. The pounding in his temples is almost as loud as the pounding in his chest.

“I don’t remember anything about yesterday night,” he says. “I don’t know what Donghyuck remembers, I don’t know if I approached him or if he did, I just… I didn’t even know he was in the area… He has a fucking mullet.”

“It’s very cute on him,” Johnny says. “His followers love it.”

Mark nods, even though he doesn’t have any idea what kind of followers Donghyuck has and what kind of problems they must have to like that mullet.

Johnny looks at him for a long moment and then shakes his head, sighing.

“It’s too fucking early for this. Where is the marriage certificate?”

Mark blinks. “How the hell do I know?”

“Fucking wear something, wash your face. I want you downstairs in half an hour, decent and in possession of the marriage certificate if possible. Let’s get this over with before his brother hears about this and flies here to castrate you and him both.”

Mark flinches when the door slams closed for the second time.

**💜**

So there was Donghyuck, dark hair and freckles and sunburnt nose and a daisy tucked behind his ear after choir practice, leaning against the wall at the back of the gym, into the indigo shadow, like a reverse vampire that smelled like sunlight, as one of Mark’s classmates offered him a smoke. Mark had almost butted in - what the hell, what the fuck, Donghyuck was _his_ annoying neighbor, the guy who rode to school every day on Mark’s mom’s small utilitarian, dented by bad parking skills on the faded silver paint, and no one could offer him a smoke, not on Mark’s watch. Thankfully, Donghyuck had said no by himself, raising his hands in apology and shaking his head with a smile, “Sorry buddy, choir first chair here. Can’t fuck up my voice.”

Then he had looked to the side, eyes catching Mark’s, lighting up immediately.

“Oh, look, my ride's here.”

“Aren’t you coming with us to the mall, Pete?” asked one of the girls, red hair, taller than Donghyuck by a whole head. They had dated, Mark remembered suddenly, and for a few weeks Mark and Donghyuck had only ridden the same car in the morning, Donghyuck scampering away hand in hand with Dahlia-Dorothy-Denise-what’s-her-name after classes. They broke up soon and Mark didn’t ask, Donghyuck didn’t tell.

“Sorry D, maybe next time? Homework is a bitch.”

She had shrugged and then politely nodded to Mark.

“Did you really refuse the smoke because of your position in choir?” Mark asked. Donghyuck wound an arm around his shoulders, leaning close enough for Mark to smell his shampoo, something fruity and milky, like peach yogurt. The sun shone mercilessly on their napes as they headed towards the car.

Donghyuck had sent him a knowing look. “I did it because it looked like you were going to have a stroke.”

“It’s bad for your lungs.”

“I know. I don’t really care about choir,” - and that was a lie Mark did not want to call him out for - “but I don’t care about their opinion either.”

 _Good,_ Mark thought, nodding to himself as he opened the door of the car to let himself in as Donghyuck did the same on the other side.

When it was his mom driving, Mark didn’t especially like riding with Donghyuck. There was never enough space for the two of them on the back seats and now that they were both grown ups, they were too prideful to claim the front seat after fighting over it all throughout elementary and middle school. In the back, it was always a tight fit. Mark’s knees smacked against Donghyuck’s at every bump in the road and he could feel the nervous tic in Donghyuck’s right thigh, shaking, shaking, against his own until Mark couldn’t tell whose thigh was shaking anymore.

As soon as he got his license though, rides with Donghyuck became… cool. Donghyuck bitched about the music all the time, insisted on retrieving the flash drive that contains their school riding playlist to add new songs and delete old ones every single night. Mark let him do it, but claimed full control over the aircon because he got cold easily. When he refused to turn it on, Donghyuck just rolled down the window, slowly, purposefully, never breaking eye contact with Mark, and whistled at every dog he saw until Mark finally caved in. They used to sing together to Bruno Mars’ Billionaire and cheesy Justin Bieber songs.

The car was old and smelled like mom’s car, and sometimes there were foldable umbrellas or shoes Mark’s mom forgot in there, or Mark’s brother’s clarinet or forgotten snack wraps from when Mark’s younger cousin asked Mark to ride her to softball practice. None of that really mattered in this particular memory, because at some point Donghyuck had stretched and touched the roof of the car with his fingers as he did so, and his shirt had gone up, inch by inch, tantalizingly slow, revealing his soft stomach, and Mark used to think his mind only had space for stupid shit like the SATs and the debate club and volunteering at the local animal shelter with his cousin Jeno and leaving this shitty town for good, but then suddenly his mind was all Donghyuck, Donghyuck, _Donghyuck_.

**💜**

Mark doesn’t find the marriage certificate in the end. He tears through the room twice but only finds Donghyuck’s other sock, the one not hanging from the bedside lamp, a velvet choker squashed under the sheets, and a cheap silver ring under the bed, although, unlike the rest, he’s not sure whether this one actually belongs to Donghyuck. When he comes down empty-handed, Johnny is definitely not happy, but they still have a flight to catch and the arrival of their taxi seems to distract him from the tirade he was ready to unleash on Mark. Almost.

“Do you at least remember where you got married? Or do you want me to call all the chapels in Vegas until I find the right one and ask for a copy of the certificate?”

Mark scratches his head and Johnny moans and leans back against the leather interior of the taxi.

“Are you even sure you got married?” he asks, rubbing his temples.

“I do remember… a few things,” Mark answers, wondering how safe it could be to talk about what he remembers. Johnny and Taeyong are close enough that Johnny is like family for them at this point. And he’s still Mark’s supervisor at work, and he definitely doesn’t need to know what Mark did to Donghyuck on the back of the taxi that took them back to the hotel. Or before that. Or after that. “I am quite sure we went to a chapel though, so there’s a high possibility we got married.”

“That’s what I guessed. Donghyuck said he remembers the chapel too. Boy gets wild when he’s drunk but he doesn’t forget anything when he wakes up, so if he says you got married then I guess you did.”

So Donghyuck remembers. Mark would like to talk to him, ask what the hell happened that night. What was Donghyuck doing in Vegas? When and how did they meet? He doesn’t need to ask what happened after that because it’s quite clear that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other in their drunken stupor (which is not surprising considering lack of passion definitely wasn’t the reason Mark dumped Donghyuck at the end of high school). But, man, he would really like to know who between them had the great idea to go into a chapel and just…

“Can we even be considered married without any legal proof that we are? I mean, there’s no certificate, no legal bind whatsoever, so is it valid?”

He already knows the answer, but he has to ask anyway. Johnny sends him a sharp glance.

“If it was a legit place then it is valid. And if it’s valid you need to divorce, or it could cause serious problems in the future in case you decide to remarry.” Johnny takes a moment to grimace behind his hand. “Plus, he’s Donghyuck. You know why this is complicated. The sooner we do this, the better for both of you.”

Mark doesn’t have the heart to say anything to that.

The taxi pulls down in front of the airport. Johnny gets off first to open the door for the senior associate who led their summation yesterday afternoon and Mark hurries to do the same for the second car. It’s quite rare for the whole team to get involved in a single case, but they all came to Vegas for this trial. Fraud, embezzlement, slush funds, the prosecutor even tried to throw money-laundering in. Their client, the chairman of one of the biggest wholefoods companies in the country, won the case - or, rather, Mark’s team won the case. Mark is still officially under John Suh’s guidance and he’s only been able to work on his own on a few minor cases, but the heads of the firm insisted it would be a formative experience for him so he got to tag along. And even if he could only sit next to Johnny in silence for the past couple of days he learned a lot, got a free trip out of it and, after they won, enough alcohol to last him for a lifetime, and for free, so he can’t really complain.

“This is how you win a case,” Johnny had told him after the first round of drinks yesterday night, voice a little slurred already.

Was their client innocent? Of course he wasn’t, Mark is quite sure Mr. Cage, the head of their team, has seen enough proof of the man’s guilt to be able to lock him in jail for at least twenty years if he wanted, but Mr. Cage - and Jonathan Suh, and Mark Lee, and the rest of the team - were not paid to do the right thing. They were only paid to keep their client out of bars. And they did a very good job at that despite their client being as clean as the cesspool of a service station.

“You ditched us yesterday night.”

The airport is crowded, loud. An automatic voice announces the cancellation of a flight directed to Mumbai. Johnny leads the group towards the gate and Mark chats idly with Mrs. Thomas as they check-in their luggages. She asks him if he had fun after he disappeared and he smiles faintly and tells her he regrets drinking too much. That makes her laugh, eyes crinkling with amusement, red lips stretching wide and heels clicking on the ground. Another associate lawyer, turns towards them at the sound and sends a knowing smirk Mark’s way.

“I’m sure you had plenty of fun, kiddo.”

“Stop bullying the kid, Clive!”

She turns towards Mark again. “I’m working on a new case and I’d like you to help me with that,” she tells him as they ignore the queue to slip through the VIP fast lane, “I’ve already asked Suh and he said you can join me on Monday, so make sure to rest properly when you get home, Lee.”

Home, Mark thinks, as the airplane takes off with a rumble and the big city, the shiny city, the city that never sleeps, gets tinier and tinier, its lights fading into dark violet clouds. It will land only a few hours later in another big city, another shiny city. Home is where the heart resides, and Mark’s heart certainly resides in New York. It always did.

Ten years have passed since he left the drowsy, sunny little town where he grew up with Donghyuck, its dusty roads and the small drugstore on the way to the schools, the mall beyond the hill, the swimming pool, pinks and blues that seemed to have come out from an Instagram aesthetic feed blending into an endless lilac loop. Donghyuck worked there as a pool boy for three consecutive summers, hired under his brother’s recommendation, and Mark had worked the ice cream booth for two, always sneaking him free ice pops during breaks. Them, too, Mark left behind. Both Donghyuck and himself, wearing discolored shirts with a wide collar, their napes pink under the light of the sun, the hair on their arms turning blonde. He left them behind to chase his dream.

He looks outside the plane window and the golden glitter of his wedding ring is caught on the triple glass, like a lost star against the indigo sky. Mark closes his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see it. Leaving it there is painful, but taking it off right now is beyond Mark’s abilities.

**💜**

The first thing Mark’s phone does as soon as he turns it on is ping with three messages, respectively from Jaemin, Renjun, and Jeno.

Jaemin calls Mark an asshole. Well, deserved. Renjun tells him Donghyuck is an asshole. Bizarre but strangely in character. Jeno sends Mark a link that turns out to be an article about Pomeranians because apparently his girlfriend wants to get a dog and she’s been spamming him with articles about dogs and he has nothing better to do than sending them to Mark with commentary on how cats would be ten thousand times better.

Mark looks at the ring on his finger. It’s fake. He eventually took it off in the airplane and checked, it wasn’t gold nor silver. He doesn’t remember where he got it, nor he remembers getting it at all, but he remembers the way it clinked against Donghyuck’s as they fucked back in the hotel, their fingers intertwined against the cotton sheets, clumsy and slippery and more automatic than pleasurable - sex like a knee-jerk reflex, like Mark’s body was trained to sink into another whether his mind was there or not, whether his dick was hard or not under the sweet lullaby of alcohol.

Mark takes a taxi to his flat. It’s expensive, but these are the perks of working for a well known, super expensive law firm. Even if you’re at the bottom of the food chain in there, you’re still better than anyone else who is outside. And Mark might be rock bottom right now, but he’s young. He started working at the firm last year, fresh out of college, ready to take over the world. It was an internship that evolved into a trial period, Mr. Cage had said, like Mark had been a Netflix subscription. One month free trial, not as a coffee boy but as a lawyer here. You do well, you stay. You disappoint me, you leave. This is how opportunities work, boy, you eat them or they eat you. What do you say?

Mark feels like he had the answer to this question on the tip of his tongue his whole fucking life.

The flat smells like stale air and cotton air freshener. Alexa greets him when he comes back but other than that it’s quiet, almost lonely. Mark pulls the curtains open and unlocks the windows, spreads them like seagull wings against the night sky. It’s a small apartment and it’s not as expensive as it could be, considering how much Mark makes in a month by being a glorified assistant lawyer. Inside, everything is new - new furniture, new books, new photographs Mark printed in a photo-book store. There’s only one picture of Donghyuck, one Renjun took of all of them with his cousin’s polaroid camera when they all went to the lake, summer of 2012. For all the time they used to spend together, they never thought of taking any pictures. What need would they have of pictures when they were always together?

Mark snorts. No pictures of their friendship, no pictures of their relationship. It’s only natural that there aren’t any pics of their marriage either. Soon enough, Johnny will come with the documents and Mark will sign them and even this last and thin red thread of destiny connecting him with Donghyuck will be severed. It’s all for the best, he reasons, like it’s always been.

**💜**

Somehow, in the memories of children, it’s always sunny. Either sunny or Christmas, at least, but Mark doesn’t have many Christmas-related memories with Donghyuck.

Donghyuck’s father lived for most of the year on an oil platform off the coast of Nova Scotia, and during spring break the rest of the Lee family traveled to Canada to spend at least a couple of days with him. Mark remembers them hoarding luggages on a taxi because they didn’t really have a car. Donghyuck’s mother never got a license. Taeyong did, but when he got enough money to afford one, Mark was already on his way to university applications and out of their little town.

Donghyuck used to saunter all the way across the street to bid Mark goodbye at four in the morning before they left, even if they had already done it the day before and Mark had told him he would be sleeping. Mark was always awake. In a way, it was painful to let Donghyuck go. Mark only knew because his mom and Donghyuck’s mom were very good friends, but the Lee family from across the street was always on the verge of leaving. Donghyuck’s mom wanted to get reunited with her husband in Canada and the only thing stopping them was money - money for a car, money for a new house, money for the moving company, money for all the immigration stuff.

“Do you want to go?” Mark had asked Donghyuck once, sitting on the porch, the sun shining on their faces because in memories it was always sunny or Christmas and Mark doesn’t have any Christmas memories with Donghyuck.

“Does it even matter? If mom wants to go, I’ll go.”

“But do you want to?”

Donghyuck never answered, but Mark thought that the way he still stubbornly threw a pebble at Mark’s window every year, at the beginning of winter break, while the streets were dark and only filled with cold and the tired rumble of the engine of the taxi, even though he himself had told Mark to just sleep and not see him off, the way he hesitated in front of the door, unsure whether to leave or to wait a single moment more, the way his face opened in a smile when Mark actually opened the door - more than that, the warmth of his body against Mark, his coat was cold but where it was opened Mark could feel Donghyuck’s warmth against his chest, through both his and Donghyuck’s shirts - they were the answer Mark needed. Donghyuck didn’t want to go. Donghyuck wanted to stay. So Mark hugged him back and hoped, hoped that new problems would arise, he hoped that the money wouldn’t be enough, he hoped that the Lees realized that, after all, they didn’t really get along. He hoped Donghyuck would come back because he was the only thing making their little shitty city just a little bearable.

> _i used to think you were untouchable, but you’re just rooted deep enough that the flood leaves you standing, monument to your own indigo grief._

Mark’s apartment is tiny but bright. All windows and white colors and the bare minimum to survive. It doesn’t have a great view because there’s another building right in the front, a modern monstrosity of steel and glass, and that’s the only thing Mark can see from his living room balcony, but when the sun is setting the sunset bounces on the steel and the glass of that building, setting it on fire, and Mark gets the best second-hand impression of it he could ever hope for. Dawns are muted, drowsy, grey on normal days, almost lilac at their best.

Mark wakes up the morning after coming back from Nevada with a heavy heart and something stuck in his throat, like a small tree frog lost in his trachea. He must have work the ring again before going to sleep, but this morning, now that the fatigue and the stupor of the day before have waned, he has to face the incredible truth. He got drunk, somehow met his highschool sweetheart and married him during a brave night in Las Vegas. Cool. He needs Jaemin, because even though Jaemin is on Donghyuck’s side, he’s the only one of Mark’s friends who could be awake at - what time is it on the West Coast? - four in the morning on a Sunday.

Mark listens to the phone rings three times before Jaemin, of course, cuts the call off.

 _You’re an asshole,_ he texts Mark a few seconds later. _I don’t wanna talk to you._

_I didn’t get married on my own, you know? I just want to know what he was doing in Vegas and if it really was a coincidence that we met._

Mark doesn’t have to wait. Jaemin calls him back immediately.

“What do you mean if it was a coincidence? Of course it was a coincidence. We have a Mark shaped ban in our friendship, no one can even name you in front of him. Congratulations, you’ve become a taboo. Donghyuck wouldn’t step in the same state you’re in even if you paid him.”

Wow, that stings. Deserved, totally deserved, but it still stings.

“Yes, I know, I broke his poor heart. It’s been, what, eight years? I’m tired of having to fight with everyone just because I broke it off with him. You’re my friends too.”

“Yes, of course, we’re your friends, Lee, aren’t we all still talking to you?”

Jaemin’s voice on the phone is sharp. Sharper than usual. He doesn’t like to talk about this with Mark - among their friends, Jaemin was the closest to Mark, but at the same time he was the one who held a grudge for the longest time after Mark graduated and just left, leaving behind a brokenhearted Donghyuck. Their friendship recovered, eventually, but the topic is still a sensitive one for them. He must also be tired, maybe he had a night shift. He probably either had one or he’s going to have a very early one soon.

“You were an asshole, congratulations, but at least you were a consistent asshole. You left, never came back, never drunk dialed him in the middle of the night crying that you wanted to be back with him. He really hoped for something like that, you know? It took two years for him to stop waiting. So you cut things off, but at least you cut them clean. Then care to explain what the fuck happened yesterday night?”

Mark sighs.

“I don’t remember the whole night. We were already drunk when we met, I guess, because I was bar-hopping with my coworkers, Johnny too. And I guess he must have been already wasted as well. We kinda had sex in a privé,” Mark confesses, and he hears Jaemin sucks in his breath sharply, “and for everything I hold dear I don’t even remember if I was aware it was him.”

“He said you knew it was him.”

There’s a long silence after that.

“Well, it’s possible. I liked Donghyuck. It was never about not liking Donghyuck. I liked him eight years ago, and judging from what I remember about two nights ago, I still fancy him. Quite a lot. Make whatever you want with that.”

 _Fancy him, quite a lot,_ is not how Mark would describe what he feels for Donghyuck it if he was honest, but it’s Jaemin and Jaemin doesn’t want his honesty. Jaemin wants his blood.

“What about the marriage thing?” Jaemin asks, and Mark shakes his head, even though the boy on the other side can’t see him. There’s close to nothing about the marriage thing in his memory storage from yesterday night.

Jaemin clicks his tongue, swears softly. “Listen, I have to go soon, my shift will start in like forty minutes and I have to be in my car in ten. But like, I know it wasn’t your fault or anything, but Donghyuck is not happy about this.”

“Donghyuck was as drunk as I was,” Mark says, and for the first time there’s an edge of anger in his voice. He doesn’t understand, really, why he always has to be the bad guy when it comes to Donghyuck. “We both got married.”

_We both had sex._

“It’s not like I took advantage of him. It’s not like I’m happy about that.”

“The last thing you should be about this is happy, Mark.” There’s rustling, Jaemin probably struggling to put on his coat while still holding onto the phone. “I’m not saying it’s your fault, I’m saying he’s going to be angry. He was already angry at you, him being angry at you is not even related to this, but this doesn’t make things better. Keep that in mind in case things get ugly.”

Ugly? Ugly how, Mark wonders. He can hear the slam of the door being closed, Jaemin jumping down the stairs. The small sound of the car being unlocked.

“It seems like you’re busy, should I let you go?”

“Yeah, I’m going.” Jaemin seems to take a deep sigh.

“Mark?” he calls, one last time. “Make sure to cut things clean again. For the both of you.”

Mark murmurs something in response, but Jaemin is already saying his goodbyes and closing the call on him. The conversation lasted only a couple of minutes but the sky outside has brightened consistently. Mark pads towards the kitchen aisle, opens the fridge and fishes a still unopened milk box and his jar of instant coffee. He sits down at the kitchen table with the sole company of the buzz of the fridge and stares at the window across the living room. In the building on the opposing street, someone has probably fallen asleep with a light on, and the yellow glow of their window is slowly being overpowered by the light of the day.

He should’ve asked Jaemin what Donghyuck is up to these days. He could probably ask Johnny, but Mark definitely doesn’t dare to talk about Donghyuck with Johnny. He would like to know - what Donghyuck is doing, why he was in Nevada, why the mullet. He wants to ask Donghyuck what the hell happened in Vegas, because Mark certainly doesn’t know. Was it really a coincidence? What are the chances?

The folder full of documents that Mark needs to reorganize, cross-check and archive in the database before Monday is lying half-open on the coffee table. With his cup of lukewarm latte, Mark makes his way towards the center of the room. It’s useless to think about Donghyuck. Like when they were teenagers, like when they broke up, it’s useless. Mark is in New York, with his lawyer job, his tiny, expensive apartment, his ridiculous paycheck. Donghyuck is a dream, a memory of a sunny day. As much as Mark wants to call him and ask him something, you can’t ask anything to a memory. And as far as the real Donghyuck is concerned, from what Jaemin said, the last thing he would like to do is talk with Mark.

Mark sighs, settles down on the couch and drags the folder close.

That’s when his doorbell rings.

**💜**

The mullet is gone, Mark realizes, and for a moment it’s a thought so big it fills his entire brain like it’s a helium balloon, bouncing against his skull in a drowsy attempt to get out. The mullet is gone and this is the Donghyuck Mark remembered, the Donghyuck from sunny memories rather than Christmas ones. Clean, sunburnt, choir boy, wearing a too big sweater he stole from his brother who got it from one of his coworkers, pastel Converse and blue jeans, the object of all of Mark’s fluffiest high school fantasies - oh, how much he wanted to hold Donghyuck’s hand and buy him popcorn. The second he would do anyway, begrudgingly, feigning annoyance. The first he was never brave enough to do.

“Hi,” Donghyuck says, and it’s flat, the flattest Mark has ever heard him sound.

That breaks the illusion, reminding Mark this isn’t the seventeen years old boy who lived next door and knocked on Mark’s door to ask for a lift to the mall. Donghyuck’s face still looks soft where his expression is steely, but his jaw looks more defined, his edges sharper. Donghyuck never looked at Mark like this, with hostility.

“Hi,” Mark says back. He looks at Donghyuck and only when it’s clear he won’t get another word like this he steps aside, letting him in. Donghyuck enters slowly, throws his jacket over Mark’s couch like he used to do back home. Like he’s a regular here. It doesn’t match with the way he looks around, gazing at the space like he wants to mark it, to seize it and crumple it between his fingers. Mark lets him do it. He opens the fridge, takes out a soft drink.

“So,” Mark asks, interrupting himself to clear his voice because, wow, that was awkward, more a squeak than a word, “what were you doing in Las Vegas?”

No small talk, no beating around the bush, he reminds himself, just like you’re in court. Straight to the point. He offers the drink to Donghyuck, but the boy refuses, shaking his head.

“Work, and then pleasure,” Donghyuck answers, as he walks towards the window. Mark doesn’t have the time to wonder whether the words had been suggestive or not because Donghyuck clicks his tongue as he looks outside, then turns back towards him for a moment.

“It’s tiny,” he says. “I expected something more from a lawyer of your caliber.”

The tone is purposefully neutral and somehow it sounds even more aggressive than it would’ve been if it had been outright taunting.

“I’m not an associate lawyer yet,” Mark answers, ignoring the bait. He opens the soft drink for himself, leans back against the counter. Donghyuck’s silhouette looks tall against the window, all legs and grace. Black against the lilac dawn. It’s one of the best days.

“Still, it’s a good job. Johnny told me how much you make.”

That piques Mark’s attention.

“Did he? Did you ask him?”

Donghyuck turns back but doesn’t come close. He leans against the glass, as far from Mark as is physically possible, so that they’re standing at the two opposite sides of the room, like boxers on a rink waiting for permission to pounce. Mark sees the corners of his mouth lift in a little smile.

“Of course I did. I need to know how my dear husband is doing in terms of figures.” That sparks a little anger in Mark and the change in his expression doesn’t go unnoticed. Donghyuck’s smile falls as fast as it had appeared.

“Although I was expecting a little better from you. Looking at all of this,” his eyes scan the room quickly, “I’d say I’m definitely disappointed. Was it worth it? Leaving us behind, leaving _me_ behind, only to find yourself holed up in this little apartment, making copies of files meant for people more important than you?”

Oh, Jaemin had warned Mark things would be ugly. The thing is, Jaemin, with his crush for Donghyuck, his pathetic little feelings for Donghyuck he could never act upon - because he didn’t have a chance, because Donghyuck belonged to Mark - was never Donghyuck’s best friend. Mark was. And as much as they loved each other, as much as they pined and circled around and thirsted and pushed their hand inside their pants needily at night thinking of each other, Mark and Donghyuck were friends first. And friends fight. And the way they fought, dirty and petty and _mean_ , is something Jaemin never got to see. Mark, on the other hand, Mark has seen Donghyuck being ugly too many times. He doesn’t need Jaemin’s advice. Not when it comes to Donghyuck.

“Did you come here to gloat? To show me how much I’ve lost?” he shoots back. He did, Mark already knows he did. “It was worth it. I wouldn’t go back on my choice. It was the right choice and you know it, everyone knows it.”

Donghyuck snorts and crosses his arms over his chest. He has sweater paws and he looks so cute it almost makes Mark soft, but he would probably punch Mark if he showed it.

“There are no right or wrong choices in this case, Mark. There was only one decision you made, unilaterally, without considering how other people might have felt about it.”

“I did take it into consideration,” Mark murmurs. “I thought very long and very hard about it. I didn’t talk about it with you, sure, but I didn’t just pack my stuff and leave without considering how that would’ve made you feel.”

“Then you just didn’t care enough.”

It’s said to hurt Mark but it probably hurts Donghyuck more. Maybe it’s true, maybe Mark cared so much that in the end he found himself not caring enough.

“Then I didn’t,” Mark says, because it’s been eight years. He didn’t offer an explanation back then, he won’t offer one now. Some things are meant to be, some things are just not meant to be. Jaemin is right, he needs to cut things clean, like last time. He needs to cauterize the wound with fire or it’ll bleed both of them to death. “It’s been years, Donghyuck. I’ve been an asshole, I hurt you. We moved on. We all moved on. You ought to let it go.”

He waits for the bitter counter, for the cruelty masked by Donghyuck’s gentle voice, for the storming out. None of that happens, and that’s when Mark feels a shiver run down his back.

“Is that so?” Donghyuck asks, basically purrs out, and the smirk comes back again. “That’s not what you said the other night.”

Oh, and if that doesn’t make Mark feel uneasy. If he doesn’t make him feel cornered. Donghyuck must realize because the smirk widens a little, not much, enough to make Mark realize Donghyuck is aware of how exposed Mark is right now.

“You don’t remember, don’t you?” he says, licking his bottom lip like a cat who got the cream. “You called my name, you called me Hyuck like we were still together when you fucked me, and then you forgot all about it.”

Unfair. This is so unfair. This little shit. Mark remembers some things. He remembers licking salt from Donghyuck’s collarbones in a club, sucking on his tongue, the light flashing madly above their head, the cocktail in Donghyuck’s hand sloshing on Mark’s wrist, periwinkle. He does remember whispering Donghyuck’s name. He thinks, maybe, he forgot that he and Donghyuck hadn’t seen each other for years. Even now, he struggles to remember they’re not friends, not lovers, nothing. Nothing anymore.

He lays down the half-empty can of soda on the counter. Maybe he didn’t forget, maybe he knew it was Donghyuck, maybe he remembered everything the whole time and just didn’t care.

“What else did I do?” he asks.

Donghyuck walks across the room, and the distance between them cracks and shatters under his feet, becoming smaller and smaller. Until it’s no more.

“You said that you regretted it. You said you were sorry,” Donghyuck says. A muscle jumps in his jaw and Mark doesn’t know, he really can’t tell, if it’s a tell-tale sign that he’s lying or telling the truth. “And, what the fuck Mark, I drank so much that I fucking believed you.”

**💜**

Donghyuck sits down on Mark’s couch and Mark drags a chair from the kitchen table because if there’s something he won’t do, it is sitting next to Donghyuck. Like this, they can stare at each other from across the coffee table, a little light blinking on Mark’s closed laptop between them.

“Do you remember the place?” Mark asks, and Donghyuck shakes his head.

“Not really. I was pretty much wasted at that point. I was already piss drunk when I met you.”

“Did you… did you recognize me? Did you know it was me?”

Donghyuck licks his lips. He thinks about it. Not about the truth, he knows very well whether he recognized Mark or not. He thinks about the answer he wants to give, how much he can let Mark know. That’s very him. In control. He used to be like that, when they were kids, easy to read, except you were reading him wrong.

“I knew it was you. And you knew it was me.”

“If you knew it was me, why did you follow me to the privé?”

Donghyuck’s eyes widen, his eyebrows shoot upwards.

“Oh, so you do remember that.”

“I remember some things. But I’ve always been the lightweight between the two of us. I’m not surprised I lost control, I’m quite surprised you did.”

“We were partying. I got… I hit a big milestone recently at work and I was letting it go, you know?” Mark’s eyebrows perk up at the mention of Donghyuck’s job, but Donghyuck doesn’t seem to notice. He pouts, a habit he probably never lost from his teenage years. “I’m allowed to let it go, sometimes. You know very well I didn’t have many opportunities to do that in the past. And then you stumbled through the door murmuring something about getting the wrong room,” - oh, Mark remembers that, he had shakily made his way to the bathroom and splashed water on his face, trying to remember his name, his surname, where the hell he was, the vodka strong on the back of his throat, the kind of shitty cocktail Johnny would choose for him to make him throw up, and on his way back, he had opened the wrong door, and… - “And you were so hot, god, I hadn’t seen you in years, and you were in a suit, and flushed, and your necktie was loose, and your hair was wet, and I was drunk and I thought you looked hot.”

“You did, mh?”

He hadn’t meant for the words to escape, not for that little smile to tug at his lips. It just happens. It triggers something in Donghyuck, some ancestral anger maybe, his whole body straightening and tensing, turning into an armor, his tongue sharpening like a spear.

“I do. You’re just an asshole. And I normally don’t fuck with assholes - well, I normally wouldn’t fuck with you for money, but two nights ago? I was on top of the world, and I wanted you, and nothing could stop me from getting what I wanted. Well, you could have, but you wanted me too.”

Of course he did, Mark thinks. Of course he wanted Donghyuck too. There hasn’t been a single moment in his life when he hasn’t wanted Donghyuck since the first time he got hard while looking at his best friend lifting himself up to sit on the pool side like a mythical mermaid, his shoulders already tanned in that sunny May afternoon. It was life changing.

Mark was a few weeks from being seventeen years old. He has wanted Donghyuck like air ever since.

In time, he decided this want was not a priority for him. Breathing, he means. In time, he found other things to want. He learned you can drown in good sex and in alcohol and in work to do, but it stayed there, constantly, like a thorn in his side. Donghyuck and his shiny collarbones, Donghyuck and his tiny moles. Donghyuck and the way his smile would turn smug whenever he realized Mark’s attention was on him. Donghyuck and his ability to leave Mark breathless.

The silence between them is foreign and familiar at the same time. Mark realizes Donghyuck is waiting. He wants an explanation back. He wants something from Mark, something, anything, after all these years. And Mark is not sure there is anything he could give Donghyuck that would make him happy.

“I missed you,” he says. “I made my choice a long time ago, I chose all of this shit instead of you, and I know you’ll hold it over me forever, and you have the right to, but I still miss you. And when I saw you, I wanted you. And I was too drunk to think about it and realize how bad of an idea it was.”

Donghyuck almost growls at the words, but Mark stops him before he can get really ugly. “You know it was a bad idea,” he says. “It’s the first thought you had when you were sober. You despise me. It was a bad idea for both of us, and neither of us was in the right state of mind to think about it and stop it, and so it happened. I’m sorry. I can’t change the past, and I’m sorry. I’m not sorry that I wanted you, I’m sorry that I did something about it.”

Like Jaemin said. A clean cut.

Except this doesn’t feel clean at all, the way Donghyuck’s whole face scrunches up and then puts itself together again, unperturbed. Whatever went through it didn’t disappear, just sank down, like waste polluting the bottom of a pond. Not clean, not clean at all.

Donghyuck looks up, and Mark has long given up on reading him, but not even he can miss the edge of anger.

“You have no right to miss me.”

“But I do. I’m not even sorry about that, my feelings are my own.”

“You won’t do anything about them.”

“That choice is also my own.”

They could have this conversation a thousand times, but Mark knows Donghyuck won’t ask him why. Why did you choose to miss me when you could have had me? Why are you so stupid? Why? Donghyuck wouldn’t ask and Mark doesn’t want to answer.

Donghyuck sighs.

“Is that all?” he asks.

“I think it is,” Mark answers.

Donghyuck blinks, nods, to himself more than to Mark, and gets up. He doesn’t wait for Mark to take him to the door. He just grabs his jacket and heads there on his own.

“You’ll hear from my lawyer soon,” he says, the same words he said the last time they met. He leaves without saying anything else, and Mark hears the clicks of his shoes on the floor of the hallway through the closed door.

And that’s it, Mark guesses, the last shreds of his past, the last tendrils of his crush, Lee Donghyuck, walking out of his life. For good. He wonders if closure was ever meant to be this anticlimactic. He wonders if closure was ever meant to be this easy to achieve.

(And that’s Donghyuck for you. He used to be like that, when they were kids, easy to read, except you were reading him wrong.)

**💜**

When Mark thinks of home, it feels timeless, a city trapped in a glass bubble. In winter, someone would turn it over, making pale lilac snow pour all over the streets, floating around angrily as the owner of the snowball would shake it, shake it, shake it. In summer, everything was lazy, like watching a movie in slow-motion.

Donghyuck would wake up at noon during summer vacation and cross the street in shorts and flip-flops to invade Mark’s air-conditioned room. They would work on their homework. Well, Mark would work on his homework. Donghyuck would play Pokemon on his Gameboy Color as he lay on his stomach on Mark’s bed, legs kicking in the air. He was never good at studying, Donghyuck. More than that, he was never good at doing things he didn’t want to do. He did the bare minimum to not get kicked out of choir for bad grades, but he never dreamed of university, he never dreamed of the future.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Mark asked him, once. (That was only the first time, but he would ask more than once, he would ask many times as his senior year approached and he had universities applications haunting both his sleep and waking hours, and Donghyuck just looked like the only thing that mattered was the new SHINee music video or news about Renjun’s last girlfriend.) Donghyuck hadn’t even looked up from the Battle Tower, his Typhlosion, his shining game record. He hadn’t looked at Mark.

“Happy,” he had said.

Happy. That’s all Donghyuck wanted to be. Such a simple answer made Mark feel ashamed of his own. He had never thought of happiness. He wanted to be successful. He wanted to make money. He wanted to leave the snow globe, the bubble of lazy days, the feeling of being at the mercy of destiny, shake, shake, shake, and you can’t help but float around like the snow, like everything else.

“And how do you plan to achieve that?”

Donghyuck had shrugged. He had grimaced. Like he did in front of one of those hard mathematics sets, the ones he wouldn’t know how to solve on his own, the ones he would look at for thirty minutes before asking Mark to do it for him. (Most of the times, Mark didn’t know the answer either, but at least together they could say they tried.)

“Is happiness something to achieve?” he had asked, as his fingers flew over the keys of his little console, a little world growing endless in his little hands.

“Well, to a certain extent,” Mark had answered, rolling the ballpen in his hands. “You need money to be happy, no one has ever been happy while struggling to make ends meet.”

Donghyuck had stopped playing. He hadn’t won - not yet, because Mark could not hear the music of a successfully completed battle - he had just stopped playing. He hadn’t answered either. He didn’t answer until Mark looked back and found his best friend staring at him, a smile on his face. He looked perfectly happy. He definitely wasn’t. So easy to read him wrong.

“Well, I am.”

Mark had never blushed so hard in his whole life. Of course. Of course he knew, he knew that Donghyuck’s family was struggling. That’s why their father couldn’t live with them. That’s why his brother wasn’t attending university but working at the diner, at the drugstore, all the odd jobs he could find, to help with the bills. That’s why they couldn’t afford an air conditioner and Donghyuck needed to come and mooch off Mark’s. He knew, but he had just forgotten.

And yet, Donghyuck was. Most of the time. Happy.

An apology was stuck in Mark’s throat. He should’ve said it, but wouldn’t that just upset Donghyuck even more? If there was one thing Donghyuck hated, it was pity. In everyone’s eyes, and in Mark’s more than everyone else’s.

“Forget it,” Donghyuck said, smiling. “I mean, forget the apology. But maybe don’t forget this. People don’t need money to be happy. People need family and friends. And entertainment.”

“I don’t agree,” Mark had said, relieved that Donghyuck at least wasn’t angry. (Wasn’t he, really?) “Not completely, at least.”

Donghyuck had laughed. The battle music was still playing. His fingers still hovered over the keys, unmoving.

“Wow, you’re so venal. Mark Lee, Boy Scout Extraordinaire, coming to stop me from smoking behind the gym and reminding me to do my maths, actually only cares about money.”

Mark had frowned. “Money is important. Without money, I’ll be stuck here forever.”

“You talk like it’s such a bad thing, to be here. I’m here. Jeno is here. Jaemin is here. Renjun is here. Your family is here.”

 _What if I want more?_ Mark thought. _What if I dream of skylines, and orange clouds, not pink, not soft white, not the color of the clouds dotting the skies of our silly little town, those thick, heady, steel-grey clouds that blanket metropolis, turning orange and gold as they absorb all the city lights._

“Would you choose money over me?” Donghyuck asked, and for a moment even the music stopped playing. Donghyuck would never ask that question again, but two years later the question would come up on its own, at the end of Mark’s senior year, printed in invisible ink all over Mark’s Yale admission letter. But this was seventeen years old Mark, who dreamed of leaving his little town, but dreamed of drowning between Donghyuck’s thighs even more.

He smiled easily, and it didn’t feel like a lie because it wasn’t - if it had been, Donghyuck would’ve known, because he was always the better one at reading Mark’s feelings, but it wasn’t - and Donghyuck smiled back.

“Of course I’d choose you. I’d always choose you.”

The battle victory jingle finally filled the room. Mark turned his attention back to his notes. Donghyuck hummed a song under his breath. They were both smiling.

> _while you draw maps to a future endless, royal cities bleed their rust into the river, skyscrapers that haunt their steel skeletons like you haunt your empty._


	2. Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you so much for the warm reception.  
> For once my author notes are super super short so I'll only say I updated the tags for the second chapter.  
> Happy reading <3

> _lunar eclipse honey-sweet on my teeth. i keep dreaming a return like a promise kept, like impossible dawn surfacing from venom-dark waves._

The aftermath of Mark's and Donghyuck's first meeting in eight years is disappointingly banal. Mark finishes his work, eats a banana for lunch and orders Chinese takeout for dinner, watches cable TV while camping on his sofa with his laptop open on some files from work and the barely touched takeout bags sitting on the coffee table in front of him. When he closes his laptop with a frustrated huff, he leaves a greasy smudge on it, a half-moon of sweet-and-sour sauce, the one you dip your shrimp puffs in on his precious Macbook, shining red under the cold interior light in an accusing way. Mark huffs at it. He wipes it clean before he flops on the bed, phone glued to his hands.

Renjun messaged him fifteen minutes ago to ask if everything's alright. He must have talked to Donghyuck again. It's a really dry, Renjun-esque message, but the fact that Renjun was able to raise his eyes from his PhD thesis long enough to think about Mark is more a defeat than a victory in its own way.

Mark doesn't know how to text back. He doesn't know how much Renjun knows. He doesn't know if it would make a difference.

 _I'm fine,_ he finally texts Renjun.

Renjun sees the message and Mark can see the little dots trembling under his name as he texts a reply and deletes it multiple times. Yeah, he thinks, me too. There's not really a good way to talk about this. He knows Renjun only wants the best for both of them - and also to survive graduate school without murdering his advisor - but sometimes things just don't work out.

Mark falls asleep completely dressed. He only has the presence of mind to set up multiple alarms for the following day and pick up tomorrow's suit before he's out like a light in the heavy darkness of the room.

💔

The whole night feels like he only closed his eyes for a moment and when he opens them again, the alarm is ringing, the most monotonous beep-beep. (Donghyuck used to set Mark's alarms in the past, and one of his habitual hookups also tried to do the same because it was too basic and boring, but Mark stopped him, because some things only belong to Donghyuck and some things are merely a way to exorcise Donghyuck.)

Mark hits the snooze button and snoozes for approximately a couple of seconds before his inbuilt sense of guilt and the mental image of the red numbers on his digital alarm clock compels him to get up. He showers and shaves, his whole body animated by some kind of nervous energy that prompts him to knock his finger against every surface he meets.

Renjun didn't write back in the end. Mark checks his other messages - mostly work-related mail notifications and spam.

There's nothing from Johnny, which is both relieving and terrifying. There's also nothing from Jaemin - not that Mark expected him to say anything. He must know, though. If Renjun knows, then Jaemin must know as well.

Maybe it's the strange anxiety pervading Mark's usually peaceful morning routine, maybe it's the lingering presence of Donghyuck's resentment, but Mark wants to message him first, be mean, be petty, ask him when did his best friend stop taking his side, tell him _yes, I cut things out, just like you wanted, now he's all yours to hit on now_.

That would be low, even for him. Jaemin has liked Donghyuck since middle school but Donghyuck was never interested in him that way.

It was quite easy to know when Donghyuck was into something - choir, his lifeguard part-time job, gaming, dancing to obscure Korean pop songs in front of the giant mirror in Mark's room (alternatively at the school's second gym, the one used by the rhythmic gymnastic club, where Donghyuck could only enter because he has sucked lips with Sarah once in second year), world geography. The moment he decided he liked something he threw all of himself into it. It was the same with Mark. Mark hung from his lips for years and Donghyuck never seemed to get the hint until one day suddenly he did and Mark's life became a living hell.

There was this whole year of middle ground in which Mark could see Donghyuck flirting with him with intent, with purpose, with a decent amount of malice, and he couldn't bring himself to do anything about it. Maybe he shouldn't have done anything about it at all, but Mark doesn't regret that last year of high school, taking Donghyuck on dates at the arcade, at the beach, at the pool, on the hood of his car under the night blue sky - being too afraid to hold hands and doing it anyway, eating the same strawberry parfait at the diner, Donghyuck licking the pink plastic spoon with a naughty look in his eyes. He doesn't regret leaving it behind, he doesn't regret having it either.

The subway is full, as usual, and Mark holds onto his briefcase and listens to the news on his Airpods. Johnny is not at the office when he arrives and Jason, the new intern, stops Mark at the door to inform him that Johnny has called in sick. This is even more relieving and more terrifying than not receiving any message at all.

Jason, who went to Yale Law with Mark and with whom Mark shares an embarrassing memory of getting drunk together and jumping in a public fountain after a particularly nasty session of exams - reminds Mark that he’s supposed to assist Mrs Thomas today. He nods dutifully and joins the woman in her office, lets her brief him about her new case, helps her organize the files and call their external collaborators for appraisal. Jason picks him up for lunch at the Starbucks under their office, saving him from the mountains of paperwork accumulating on his desk.

"Is she any better than Johnny?" he asks about Mrs. Thomas, between a bite of sandwich and a sip of coffee. Mark shrugs in response.

"Johnny makes me work a little less, but he usually gives me more responsibilities. She's just dumping all the trash on me, basically. But it's still experience, you know?"

Jason nods, trying to hide his jealousy. He will probably not get offered the same opportunity Mark had - working for the firm - but this internship will still make a very good addition to his resume.

"Man, I really wish I could've come to Las Vegas with you all. I heard you had a really wild night and disappeared with like, a Youtube star or something?"

Mark blinks, confused, and then laughs in his face.

"What? Who told you that?" Oh Lord, that would've been so much better than getting married to the fucking guy whose heart you broke during senior year, you know? But Jason doesn't laugh with him.

"Synclair! He said you left to go to the toilet, and at some point he came to look for you and found you hooking up with that guy from the impossible gaming challenges, that Korean-American youtuber with the puppy eyes that my sister likes so much. Full sun, isn't it?"

"Korean-American youtuber?" Mark repeats, slowly.

"Be careful man, half your sandwich is dripping on your thigh."

Mark looks down and curses, manages to save his lunch and one of his favorite suits at the same time by keeping a giant dollop of sauce from falling onto it.

"That was close, thank you. What were you telling about, Fullsun? Is that the youtuber's name?"

"Don't you know? According to Syn, you had your tongue down his throat. Man, how must it be, to fuck a celebrity? Guy recently got fifty million subscribers to his channel, my sister wouldn't shut up about it."

It takes a second to open the phone and look up a name on Youtube, but unfortunately for Mark his lunch break is over. Work picks up in the afternoon, and he has to force himself to focus when Mrs. Thomas scolds him for the third time. Jason's words become a long line of sound in the middle of static noise, a line that brings him back to Lee Donghyuck, his gaming username, Haechan. In English it means full sun.

💔

And this is when the timeline gets messed up. Mark likes to think about Donghyuck as a sweet, wide-eyed menace, a siren that tempted him from the edges of the pool, legs crossed, that lifeguard shirt clinging to his slender chest. Donghyuck, smiling before he ducked down and slipped into the water, cursing Mark with the awareness that if he were to try and reach him he would sink completely, diving into the unknown. Unreachable, untouchable. That Donghyuck was a locker room secret, one Mark would write childish poems for, comparing him to fire and sugar and the colors of sunset bleeding into the night, to bright red flip-flops and discolored t-shirts. He would tuck them where Donghyuck would never find them - among the pages of his Math books, inside the lyrics booklets of Donghyuck’s least favorite CDs. Mark likes to think about Donghyuck in the terms of a manic pixie dream rather than a real, actual boy, blood and flesh and short, thick lashes and chlorine in his hair. This real boy didn't have stars in his eyes but he would put cherry lipgloss on and wear his shortest shorts just for Mark, and would corner him in the alley behind the arcade, between the cigarette vending machine and the open back door that led to the staff room - they weren't even supposed to be there but Jaemin worked at the arcade and let them sneak in the back when he had an evening shift. That Donghyuck, grown into his own skin like a butterfly emerging from his cocoon, all new boyish angles and old softness, his hands in Mark's shoulders, the almost unnoticeable stubble on his chin because it was late, hair too long because he didn't have the money to cut it and Taeyong would just chop it unevenly. He would taste the waters, lick the lipgloss away leaving only chapped lips and the faint taste of bubble chewing-gum and cheap beer - artificial strawberry and alcohol, the grossest combination, and yet he would make it work the way only he could. This Donghyuck had the nerve to lick into Mark's mouth, taste the alcohol Mark had stolen from Renjun's hands just to prove he was not one hundred percent a good boy, after all, that he could be _cool_ \- cool enough for Donghyuck to look at him. And this Donghyuck, oh, he did more than look. He had the nerve to stake a claim, but not to follow through with it. What a crime, what a boy.

The following morning Donghyuck pretended he didn't remember. He said he was probably too drunk, “Don't think too hard about this, Mark, it's not that deep.”

(And yet, it was. It has ever been deep for Mark. The depth of his feelings was the same bottomless pool his dream of Donghyuck pretended to disappear in as soon as Mark tried to kiss him.)

This Donghyuck, much like the one who would lie to Mark's face eight years later, was a very convincing liar. It's just that Mark knew him too well. He knew when he was lying, he knew when he was bluffing, he knew when he was out of his depth.

(And, unlike Mark's mythical siren image of Donghyuck, the real one had clammy hands and bright red ears, he doubted his own gestures and he was afraid to disgust Mark, and he was just, so, so painfully human it hurts Mark, even now it still hurts, to think about him. So he doesn't.)

💔

Yet, as much as Mark hates thinking about the real Donghyuck - the one whose heart he broke - it's only possible to a certain extent to avoid someone who lives inside your own head, filling the cracks between work and those cheap nights at the bar, talking to strangers whose mouth is never as soft or heart-shaped enough. Even in his absence, Donghyuck snorts at Mark’s small apartment and tasteless takeout, sits on the edge of his desk at work, like a ghost, plush thighs clad in old jeans, legs crossed, leaning back as he watches Mark slaving away his youth to get a sliver of recognition in a world of sharks. He’s wearing a red hoodie three sizes too large for him, and there are shades and sunlight on his skin, the pattern of light filtering through the leaves of the pines at the park behind the school. It doesn’t match the artificial light of Mark’s office. Nor does his laughter.

Mark shakes the judging laughter away - it feels even more real hearing the real thing from Donghyuck just yesterday - and sits down in the empty office way after office hours are done, ignores the bundles of documents he should sort out covering his desk, and types two words on the Youtube search bar.

Full sun. The algorithm corrects it to FullSun.

Donghyuck's face comes out on the thumbnail of the last video, sporting that damn mullet Mark loathed seeing on him. _Las Vegas VLOG + celebrating 50mln followers_. Mark’s cursor hovers on the link, opening it on a new tab, but instead of watching it he ends up browsing the page, skipping through videos and videos. There are playlists for the different games Donghyuck has played or is playing, then some for his personal vlogs and challenges, special content. He seems to have quite the established channel. Mark clicks impatiently on the bar, trying to get to the last video on the channel - the first Donghyuck posted.

It's a very simple video, a horror survival playthrough Donghyuck played without showing his face. The title, _I scare myself to death because I was dumped yesterday_ , leaves Mark breathless. He tries to swallow and realizes he can't. He closes the page, closes the browser, turns the whole laptop off and then rests his head on it. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

💔

New York breathes fog and fumes and its lights paint them red against the gray sky. Mark can afford the taxi home but he regrets taking it when his fingers can’t stop drumming on the glass and the taxi driver shoots him a mean look. In moments like these, thoughts so loud other people can hear them too, taking the subway is a lot more easy on the mind. The loud noises would’ve drowned out that first scream Donghyuck let out in his first video, so strangled and high it almost seemed like he was crying instead of scared.

Mark closes his eyes and holds tight on the leather handle of his briefcase to keep his hands busy. He pays with his work card and for once doesn’t worry about how he’ll explain it to his budget manager - it’s late enough that he can justify the price of the trip home with safety concerns. The walk to the elevator is almost like a stumble. He has to lean against the mirror in the elevator because his knees feel like jelly. He just wants to shower, brush his teeth and sleep, sleep this week, this month, this year away.

He checks his mailbox out of habit just in case he received something from one of the agencies on the other side of the country. There’s nothing thankfully, but that’s when he realizes the still open tab from Donghyuck’s Las Vegas vlog. He doesn’t mean to watch it, he just clicks on it to close it, but before he can his eyes fall on the comments, specifically on the third one.

The username reads as a very anonymous _clary luz_. There’s no pic, just a bright red circle where the avatar should be. The message is quite short but it lures Mark in like a moth to a flame.

_did you meet your ex in vegas in the end lol_

💔

Johnny looks thunderous when he opens the door. Good, Mark thinks. At least they match, because he's never felt as thunderous in his life. Scratch thunder, he’s a whole storm.

"Mark, it's fucking almost two in the morning-" Johnny tries to say, but Mark interrupts him.

"Why didn't you tell me about Donghyuck's Youtube channel?" he asks, in the most accusative tone he can muster. In hindsight, it wasn't probably a good idea. Johnny's eyes narrow, like they do when something annoys him in court. But he falters at the question nevertheless and Mark uses his confusion to let himself in

"Oh, and why would it be your business? You and Donghyuck broke up years ago."

"You don't think I should've known? Not before, maybe, but after what happened in Las Vegas? I fucking deserved to know what he was on about. Did you know he has at least six drunk vlogs where he disses me?"

"Of course I know, half of the likes on those videos are from Taeyong on different accounts. Why would it make a difference to you? Your name was never made, if that's what you're worried about. Your career is safe, no one will ever know you had a fling with a Youtube personality. Are you happy now?"

"No! I'm not happy, I'm not fucking happy! I just want all of this to... to end... I want Donghyuck to sign the damn papers and get the fuck out of my life, and instead he's... he's everywhere. Eight years carefully spent avoiding him thrown in the toilet because I just went to Youtube to find out that last week during a livestream he said he knew I would be in Las Vegas, and that he didn't know what would happen if we met. What the fuck does this mean?"

“Okay, Mark, I need you to calm down now…”

“I won’t fucking calm down, don’t tell me to calm down!”

Johnny's lips thin out until they almost disappear in his mouth. He shakes his head.

"I told him we would be in Vegas,” he says, slowly, carefully enunciating every syllable as if he was talking to a child. “I did it because I didn't want him to run into you. I hoped he would postpone the trip, but he said that you would never meet by accident because it's a fucking bit city and what were the odds?"

"Yeah, what were the odds?" Mark asks, beside himself. "It seems like something he planned out himself."

Johnny's eyes narrow. "He would never," he says, but there's an edge of uncertainty creeping in his voice. He's known Donghyuck for many years, he knows he could be capable of it. The thing is, did he?

"I need to talk to Donghyuck," Mark says.

 _I need to punch him,_ is what he thinks. He can perfectly picture him, sloped over his gaming chair, glasses low on his nose, hair barely damp from a shower, a graphic tee sloped over his shoulders as he nurses the fourth beer of the stream, shaking it like it was a fucking flute of champagne, "Ah, the Las Vegas trip, it's going to be so fun, I'm going to meet up with Felix and Chanee and Yangle, wow, I haven't seen him since the San Diego meet-up last year, and you know what's fun?" A long sip, throwing his head back, showing the line of his throat, shining from the blue light of his computer screen. "Ahh, this is very good, a good feeling... What was I saying? Ah, my ex is gonna be there too, that asshole. I wonder what would happen if we met," eyes glassy and lips wet, until he had cleaned them up with the back of his hand.

There's no way he didn't make it happen on purpose. The meeting, surely, the fucking too maybe, surely not the marriage, not even him is dumb enough to do that out of spite. Mark wants to punch him so bad.

"Well, then you can fucking go and do it yourself. I'm tired of fighting battles for you children," Johnny says, throwing himself all over the couch with a tired sigh. "I spent the entire day on the phone trying to get him to reason, but it seems like you both want this fight so I think I'll just let it happen."

"What do you mean?"

"Donghyuck is refusing to sign the papers. Said good luck dragging him to court. He has more than enough money that you can sue him and win and maybe get yourself a better apartment than your shithole, his words, while he won't even feel a blip in his bank account. So go, Mark, go find him and talk it out with him. I'm tired of playing middleman. You're old enough to do this yourselves."

Oh, _now_ he even refuses to sign the papers? Mark is definitely going to punch him.

"Where can I find him?" he asks, voice shaking with barely restrained anger.

"Where he's always been. He never left. He still lives in Heatherfield."

💔

The plane ticket is bought on rage and impulse, but from then onwards it’s all calculations. Mark blesses the fact that it’s almost the weekend and takes Friday off using his last day of paid leave for the next three months. Then he goes online, rents a car, and books a room at a motel a few minutes outside the town.

Mark’s parents left Heatherfield three years ago, following Matthew - their eldest son - after he moved to Oregon with a job promotion that brought more problems than benefits. Leaving the house where they raised their children was a tough decision, but it was clear to everyone that Mark would never willingly go back to Heatherfield - not after the way he left it - and Matthew and his wife were struggling to raise three daughters on their own while working full-time jobs to cover the costs of the new house. The old house in Heatherfield was hastily sold to buy a more modest apartment in Portland, which means that, now that Mark is finally coming home, he actually has no home to come back to.

There’s only Donghyuck, the reason he never returned until now, the reason he’s finally coming back.

There’s Donghyuck and there won’t be Mark’s house, the living room where they first met, the looming shadow of the Dracaena in front of the big window cutting the light on the walls with blade-like leaves, the faded burgundy couch where they sat down to watch football with Mark’s dad and Donghyuck’s brother, the adjacent kitchen, the table they ran around, spinning in circles as they chased each other as kids, the leaking sink where they washed dishes together - it was an unspoken rule that Donghyuck would be on drying duty whenever he invited himself to Mark’s for dinner. Mark’s room, where they pasted stars on the ceiling and taped movie posters on the wall together, where they played video games in silence, lulled by the comforting murmuring of Korean coming from the living room as their moms chatted. They kissed endlessly in that room, they had sex for the first time in that room, on Mark’s cramped bed, sugar paper sheets, Donghyuck saying he had never taken his clothes off for a man before, the blush sitting high on his cheeks. Mark had held his hand, told him it was okay, _me neither_.

He took Donghyuck downstairs afterwards - after they had put their clothes and identities together again, no coming back after something like this - to the kitchen, looking for something to eat. They sat on the porch until the sun rose, the night quilted with stars bleeding into ruby-red, blood red, and they shared an open packet of popcorn because that was the only thing Mark had found in the pantry other than popsicles, and it was too cold for those.

“I think I might be in love with you?” Donghyuck had said, tilted towards the end, like he was asking a question.

There, in the same garden where Mark would break things off only one month later, Mark actually answered, “I think I might, too.”

Donghyuck just nodded, flashed him a smile - a question, he asked, but he was the answer - and ate the last popcorn in the loud silence of an early June morning.

The worst thing is that Donghyuck still lives in the same house, just across the street. Mark will have to walk in front of the remnant of his old life, watch from outside, like the stranger he has become, the geraniums someone else is tending to, the new swing someone else will have installed, violating the sanctity of his memories. He made things this way, but somehow he always expected his decision to be reversible, even if he didn’t want to reverse it. Deep inside, he did want to come back for summer and Christmas, but there was no time, there was no will. He was just too afraid of Donghyuck’s stubborn love, of Donghyuck’s stubborn hate, of Donghyuck, beautiful Donghyuck, stubborn Donghyuck. And when he was sitting in his tiny double room all alone - his roommate going back to Cleveland for Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, and then summer, and then changing roommates and starting the routine all over again - he could fool himself of thinking that breaking up was such a good idea, that he wouldn’t have had time to go back even if he and Donghyuck had still been together. It’s better like this. It was better like that. To end things before they went sour.

Yet they are, still. Sour.

💔

Liking Donghyuck is not something that happens suddenly.

Mark realizing he’s gay is something that happens suddenly, when he gets hard while watching a high school’s baseball game. It’s not the first time it happens but it’s the first time he realizes it’s connected to a boy, specifically the substitute pitcher of the opposing team. He thinks something is wrong with his penis for approximately three weeks as his body confuses him again and again, before one day Taeyong corners him against the fence while he waters the flowers and asks him _what happened and why are you ignoring my brother_. Mark gasps like a dying fish and spills his guts at Taeyong’s feet because Taeyong’s disappointment is not scary, just heartwrenching, and Mark can’t stand it - and maybe also because he really needs brotherly advice but his own brother is in Columbia and won’t come home until Thanksgiving and there’s no way Mark is calling him to ask about unwanted erections.

He feels dumb once Taeyong helps him connect the dots. He could’ve gotten there on his own, in due time, he just never expected this to happen with a boy. Taeyong has a girlfriend - they will stay together for years, and only after they break up and she starts dating another girl will Mark realize they were both lying to the world, but not to each other - but he looks like he understands as he pats Mark’s back and tells him that it’s fine, nothing is wrong with him.

“It’s okay, Mark. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. But I hope you realize that my brother is thirteen and if you don’t behave around him I’ll castrate you.”

That, at least, makes Mark chuckle. Donghyuck is a fucking baby, squishy cheeks and high-pitched voice and bowl-cut hair.

“There’s no way I could ever like him that way,” he answers.

Taeyong’s glare is surprisingly sharp for someone usually so gentle.

“Whatever,” he says. “Don’t ignore him anymore. He cries when you do that.”

So Mark makes peace with Donghyuck and tells him a half-truth about how growing up is scary and confusing and his body is changing and how he needed space and Donghyuck looks at him and says, “You look the same to me tho,” and Mark laughs, awkwardly, and resists the urge to answer _I don’t feel the same, tho._ They go back to eating their lunch together and studying together and playing baseball and videogames together and having sleepovers together, and if Mark gets hard sometimes it’s because he’s growing up and it’s normal, it happens to everyone. It doesn’t matter that it happens when he looks at other boys specifically. He talks about it with Donghyuck sometimes, not about liking boys but about unwanted erections and watching porn. It makes him feel more normal, like he can still connect with Donghyuck even if they’re so different. Donghyuck tells him they should check who's bigger between them and Mark tackles him down and calls him gross and tells him he's bigger for sure since Donghyuck’s puberty hasn’t hit yet. They wrestle for hours, the awkwardness dissipating into relief. At least Mark still has his best friend. At least.

Liking Donghyuck doesn’t happen suddenly. It takes years for Mark to accept that no, his best friend is not a kid anymore and yes, he is hot and maybe Mark wants to buy him all the tacos he wants and kiss him before and after it. It takes Donghyuck going through two girlfriends and Mark swallowing bile and refusing to ask him anything about them because _it hurts_ , and avoiding Donghyuck as subtly as he can - which means not subtly at all - and Donghyuck getting angry, and fighting, and fighting, and fighting, and fighting again, but Mark only ever allows himself to like Donghyuck when Donghyuck starts liking him too, when Donghyuck kisses him in the alley behind the arcade and then pretends he didn’t want to do it the morning after, and from then on he can’t take his eyes off Mark.

Mark will never know what prompted Donghyuck’s big gay crisis in the end. If it was him, if it was someone else. If it had always been there and there simply wasn’t any crisis at all, just Donghyuck waking up one day and deciding he wanted Mark and he would get him. There wasn’t enough time to talk about all these things when they were together, and in the future Mark will regret missing those pieces of the story - if only because he won’t get another chance to ask for them.

In the present, which is actually the past, Mark looks at Donghyuck and Donghyuck looks back, almost daring. He wears cheap lipstick and the faintest hint of eyeshadow at the outer corner of his eyes, and coral blush on his cheekbones, and he dyes his hair - and he fights with his mom and brother about it, for days, but the fiery red of his hair burns gloriously for the first two weeks of December, until he leaves for Nova Scotia to spend Christmas with his dad.

When he comes back, his hair has gone back to black and the only shadow in his eyes is the one of a scowl. Taeyong tells Mark they fought the whole time. About his hair, about his makeup, about his future plans. He says the last part under his breath, looking a little pained. Mark knows Taeyong’s parents were disappointed and relieved at the same time when he decided to give up on university to work odd jobs so that he could help out with the bills. He also knows they were hoping that at least Donghyuck would get into a good university, maybe with a scholarship. He knows Taeyong was kind of banking on that too, working so hard to give his little brother a better chance at life. But Donghyuck doesn’t seem to want a better chance at life, and his GPA is definitely not good enough for a good university, let alone a scholarship.

“Maybe you should talk to him,” Taeyong says. “Give him a little motivation. He would come to the East Coast just to be close to you, I bet.”

And Mark really wants to talk about it with Donghyuck, give him tips and pointers and all the books he used to study for SATs, maybe throw away his dignity and beg him to try and come to the East Coast just for him, but then he goes out in the street and sees Donghyuck making a snowman in front of the lawn, his nose red, his ears red, a single red strand peeking from that terrible, home-made black dye-job, all red in a snow so white it almost looks light blue. When he sees Mark he looks down, as if a little ashamed of the sorry state he’s in, no lipstick and no makeup and no pretty hair and the weight of all the expectations his parents dumped on him making him slouch worse than ever. His eyes are a little red too, and swollen, like he might have just been crying. He still looks beautiful.

Mark opens his mouth and doesn’t think about what will come out.

“Hey, wanna be my prom’s date?”

> _stare too long at the sun & you're left blind, but the light was never a punishment, your body never a secret meant to be kept._

Mark doesn’t tell his parents he’s going back to California. He doesn’t tell Jaemin or Renjun or Jeno, even if he wants to meet them and he knows they’re all only a couple of hours away and they could easily organize something during the weekend. He doesn’t know how long this thing with Donghyuck will take. It could drag out for the entire weekend or be over in a few minutes, a final ascending climax in the street that saw them grow up. Mostly, Mark is not sure he’ll be up for doing anything after talking to Donghyuck. There is no _after_ for now. There is no plan beyond getting there.

So, first, Mark comes home, he packs clean clothes and his laptop and only comes back inside to pick up the fucking wedding ring so he can throw it in his husband’s face. On the Airtrain to the airport he googles Donghyuck’s name and gets a thousand results. It’s mostly articles from those indie online magazines that deal with teenage viral phenomena like Youtubers and Tiktok personalities, and a lot of fanpages on Facebook. Apparently there’s a good chunk of fanon lore on Donghyuck’s extremely bad first love circulating on the Internet, with even fanfictions on him and his nameless lover. In his streams, Donghyuck never actually called Mark by name, nor said he was Korean-American too, so part of Donghyuck’s fanbase actually thinks Mark is some kind of white jock. It would almost make Mark snort if he wasn’t so angry with Donghyuck. He’s so angry he can’t even start to unpack why he’s angry, the reasons layering in his mind, playing at who screams louder.

There’s the fact that Donghyuck shared parts of their relationship online, parts that were sacred to Mark and that he thought would be sacred to Donghyuck too (namely, every part of their relationship, because even Donghyuck just mentioning it on Youtube feels wrong to Mark). He knows he has no place to feel hurt but that basically doesn’t make it hurt any less. Then there’s the fact that Donghyuck is _still_ angry, and Mark has even less of a right to feel hurt over this - he once made sure he never any more rights on Donghyuck’s feelings whatsoever - but hasn’t it been so long? Isn’t it time to let it go? It’s in Donghyuck’s nature to be genuine, almost bloody in his feelings, but eight years is a long time to hold a grudge, isn’t it? There’s Donghyuck smug scorn of Mark’s life, the fucking unfairness of it all - Mark making sacrifices, studying hard, keeping his head down his whole life, leaving the love of his life for the chance at the future he wanted, and the fact that Donghyuck, _Donghyuck_ , barely graduated from high school, got to hit big and rub it in his face, the way he sauntered into Mark’s home and said it was too small, from his fifty million subscribers Youtube royalties, the petty defiance by which he’s refusing to sign the fucking divorce papers just because _he can afford it_. There’s the fact that he’s refusing to sign the papers in the first place. What an asshole. Mark squirms out of anger in his airplane seat, asks for a glass of wine to calm himself, doesn’t even get it because of fucking turbulence. The turbulence is inside of him, all over the place.

More than everything, he doesn’t know if Donghyuck planned for this to happen, even in some infinitesimal part. If he went to that specific club planning to meet Mark. It seems low, even for him, especially for him. Mark feels nauseous because some part of him feels good at the thought - the thought that Donghyuck still can’t get over him to this extent, that Mark still has that power over him. Some other part of him is going bollocks over this whole situation, both angrily and anxiously, and somewhere in that mess the most rational part, the one that analyzes and compartmentalizes, is wondering who gave him the right to go after Donghyuck. Who gave Donghyuck the right to drive Mark to do this for him. No one. He’s being an asshole, he realizes, and it’s fine because Donghyuck was an asshole too.

The car Mark rented is waiting for him in Sacramento. It’s a Japanese SUV, expensive in terms of gas but sturdy enough to withstand the anger of the sky pouring over the streets. The weather forecast announced rain for the rest of the weekend in the whole state, and Mark can’t help but feel it’s somehow ironic. In memories, it’s always summer or Christmas, but in real life it rains. It’s the ugly kind of rain, when it’s so fast and copious the water doesn’t find anywhere to go and the road becomes a lake, making the ride dangerous and slow, five hours instead of the usual three, a tedious and slow drive back into the belly of the monster of his memories.

Mark drives past trees and towns whose names all sound the same - somethingville, somethingcreek, something-lake-city - and that also look the same, the same as the city he’s heading to. He drives past the countless white lines on the road, drowned in dirty rain-water, past the mud piling at the edge of the streets. His expensive watch shines against intermittent fluttering of the blades, wiping away the dirty water on the windshield in a half-moon shape. The red numbers on the dashboard signal that it’s still early afternoon when Mark reaches the outskirts of Heatherfield, and it’s only when he drives past the big, rusty _Heatherfield_ sign and into the city the rain relents, showing him an alien-like landscape of bleak, grey buildings and large puddles.

The pool is closed - it looks like it’s been closed forever, the building sprayed with graffiti, the windows broken behind the grates. The sign has disappeared, leaving behind a cleaner rectangular shape where it once used to be. Most of the shops are closed too, or they changed into something different. Mark’s car attracts a few curious glances from the residents, but Heatherfield is big enough that people don’t wonder too much at a new car in town.

At the red light, a flier catches Mark’s attention. It says in big gothic letters PROM 2020. It’s clear that they went for a medieval theme. It’s going to be in the first week of May, only a few weeks from now. Kinda late. Mark’s prom had been at the end of April. A fairy lights theme. Donghyuck had somehow managed to snatch a flower crown to wear for the pic, but they never got to take it.

The light turns green and Mark leaves, down the street, not sparing his old high school even a single glance. He takes a familiar, battered secondary street, the one his mom would take when driving him and Donghyuck back home from school when they were children. It’s empty and a little lonely. It looks bigger than Mark remembered, but the houses kind of look smaller, almost to compensate.

Mark’s old house, though, looks like it’s always looked. Exceedingly normal. That’s what makes it exceedingly alien. It’s the same old door but a new fence around the garden, although probably it was Mark’s father who changed it and not the new owner. It’s the same old swings and new curtains at the windows, not the expensive linen ones Mark’s mom would be proud about but anonymous, simple curtains, no lace, something you would buy at the department store. It’s the same old ash tree in front of the window of Mark’ brother’s room, but messy dandelions growing scattered around it, so different from the tidy geranium flowerbeds Mark’s mom tenderly doted on. It’s different, it’s alien, and yet, it still screams home to Mark, and the fact that he can’t park in front of his lawn and saunter in the living room asking if there’s any leftover for lunch because he’s driven the whole morning and he’s starving feels like a betrayal.

Instead, Mark parks in front of Donghyuck’s house. That, too, looks exactly the same. Taeyong’s pickup is not on the driveway. Although, Mark realizes, Taeyong probably doesn’t have a pickup anymore. Maybe he doesn’t even live here anymore. He should’ve asked Johnny, in retrospect, because the thought of ringing a bell and having Taeyong - or worse, Donghyuck’s mother - opening the door, makes his stomach crawl in shame.

He stays inside the car for a moment, collecting his breath. He should prepare a speech, but even now he can’t put his thoughts in order. He just knows that he needs to scream them to Donghyuck.

One look at his phone shows him a Youtube notification from fifteen minutes ago.

_FullSun is live now!_

He’s live. The little shit is live right now, behind those walls, while Mark is too petrified to leave his car. He gets out and slams the door shut. Then he rings the doorbell.

💔

Mark never tells his mom he’s taking Donghyuck to prom. She hugs him when he receives his admission letters and kisses the top of his head and calls him a perfect son and tells him he’s the pride of the family and that he’s going to places. She makes him his favorite seafood stew, extra spicy just the way he likes it, and tells him he can invite his friends if he wants. Donghyuck and Renjun have something to do for choir and can’t make it - although Mark’s mom will keep some stew for Donghyuck and his brother anyway, the way she’s always done for years now - but Jaemin and Jeno are there, politely bringing their parents’ greetings and listening to Mark’s mother rambling about how her son still doesn’t want to tell who her date for prom is.

“He’s so secretive, this boy. He won’t tell us anything.”

Mark sighs. “I’m not taking anyone, mom, stop being nosy.”

“It’s my job to be nosy! You should make great memories at prom!”

Mark exasperatedly meets Jaemin’s eyes over the table and the conversation is quickly changed to Jaemin’s aunt visiting from Seoul next week.

After dinner Mark is excused from doing the dishes, just for today, so he and the boys sit down in the living room and put on a superhero movie.

“So, are you really taking no one out for prom?” Jaemin asks. “Because I know a few girls from my class who would like a free ticket. Hell, I would like a free ticket if I didn’t already have one.”

“Wait, who’s taking you?”

“The captain of the female basketball team, Doğan.”

“Nisa? How did you convince her?”

Jaemin shrugs. “She fought with her boyfriend and she had no date. I’m cute and we can talk basketball. Although there’s a great chance she’ll get back with her boyfriend before prom, which means I’ll have to go on my own since I already have a ticket.”

Mark nods slowly. He doesn’t even ask Jeno, who’s going steady with a girl in the debate club named Jane who still, after two years of dating, pronounces his name like it’s French. They’re both juniors so neither of them is going.

Jaemin texts something furiously on his phone.

“So, you know Martha, in my US History class? She’s asking if you can sneak in if you’re really not bringing anyone…”

“I’m taking Donghyuck,” Mark says, under his breath.

Jaemin stops texting. Mark focuses on Captain America getting pumped with steroids on the screen, but he can feel both his friends looking at him. They can all hear the clang of pots in the kitchen as Mark’s mother puts everything away. The door is open. Mark catches Jaemin’s eyes for a moment. He looks so pale, on the verge of throwing up, even if most of it is just the light of the television.

He turns towards the screen again, but he can’t focus on the pictures. He sees Jaemin’s scowl at the corner of his eyes. Captain America is in Germany by the time Mark’s mom goes upstairs and Jaemin is talking as soon as she steps on the stairs.

“You mean as friends? Because people won’t think you’re going as friends.”

Mark gives a quick look at the stairs, the light coming from the second floor, before he looks Jaemin straight in the eyes.

“I don’t think we’re going as friends either.”

“What do you mean with that? Aren’t you going to Yale next fall? Why are you doing this if you’re going to leave anyway?”

“Sssh,” Jeno says, just as Mark’s mother comes back. Jaemin sends Mark an angry scowl and Mark scowls back. They spend the rest of the movie in silence.

When it’s over, Mark walks his friends to the door. His mother might still be listening, so no one says anything. They’ll talk about it tomorrow, Mark thinks, even if no, they really won’t. (They’ll never talk about it again, not when Mark and Donghyuck start dating, not after they break up either, because Jaemin will stop talking to Mark after that. The biggest, meanest _I told you so_ ever.)

It’s not even half an hour after they’ve left that Donghyuck comes back. Mark sees the light on his room on the opposite side of the street blinking yellow in the night.

Donghyuck had laughed at his proposal at first. Like it was funny. Then he had looked angry, the kind of _if it’s a joke, it’s really not funny_ look. Then he had looked hopeful. Then angry again. Constantly changing like a Da Vinci painting, depending on the angle you watch it from.

There were questions blooming on his lips. _What about your parents? What about my parents? What about the people at school?_ But it was Donghyuck and Donghyuck liked to pretend he was different from everyone else. In control. Fearless. So he had just said yes.

That night, Mark sits at his desk and looks at his admission letters. Yale, Harvard, Columbia University. He also got into some universities in California too. He could have a full scholarship in Berkeley, but who would ever choose Berkeley after getting into Yale?

Jaemin is right. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he’s wanted Donghyuck for so long. And Donghyuck wants him too. They’ll figure it out. Maybe.

💔

Mark rings the bell and waits, rings again. He doesn’t know for how long he just stands there, waiting, then he rings again, a prolonged thirty seconds, the shrill sound so loud he can hear it through the open door.

He frowns and lets it go, confused, thinks of calling Johnny or Jaemin or someone and ask them where the fuck Donghyuck is, when someone calls to him.

“There’s nobody home.”

He looks to the side and sees a tall brown-haired girl staring at him from the following garden. She’s wearing the uniform of the same high school Mark went to eight years ago and she looks terribly familiar.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s nobody home. The tenant left town a few days ago. He still hasn’t come back.”

Mark blinks, confused.

“No, sorry, I’m quite sure he’s home. As far as I know, he was here yesterday.”

She blinks back, equally confused. She used to have a pink tricycle in the past. Mark frowns as he tries to remember her name.

“Who exactly are you looking for?”

“A friend, Korean. Peter Lee?”

The moment he says Donghyuck’s English name the girl’s posture changes and she glares at him in the most judgmental way a teenager can muster.

“Are you a stalker?”

“What? No!”

“How did you find his address? He didn’t say it on Youtube.”

Mark looks at her. “Aren’t you…” He snaps his fingers. “Alejandra? Alex? Alex Garcia, isn’t it? I babysat you when you were like… five?”

She scrunches her nose at him, as confused as he is.

“What?”

“I used to live in this area. I was back in the city and I thought I would stop by,” he says, not really knowing why he’s explaining himself to some sixteen years old kid he saw slobber over his lap thirteen years ago. Her eyes go wide.

“Ah, aaah! Sorry, sorry, I thought you were one of Pete’s crazy fans. Once we had to call the police because some girl was camping on his porch while he was away. Gross.” She stares at him more closely. “Wait, aren’t you the missing son of the Lees? The lawyer, the one who wouldn’t come back?”

That is, in fact, Mark.

“Listen, is… Peter home? Because if he’s not, I really have places to be.”

She stares at him like she can’t believe he’s for real.

“Wow, this is going to be awkward”, she murmurs. When Mark doesn’t answer and just stares at her, she shakes her head. “He doesn’t live in that house anymore. His family moved to Canada three years ago. They were on rent, so now there’s a different tenant.”

“What? No! I’ve been told he never left Heatherfield.”

“Yes, he… he stayed here. He bought a house. Oh, this is going to sound so, so bad. You really have no idea, don’t you?”

“Can you… can you just tell me where he is? I really have urgent matters to attend to, and…”

There’s something akin to pity in this girl’s eyes and Mark doesn’t like it one bit. But she nods, quickly, and then she points towards the other side of the street.

There’s a moment of silence as Mark follows Alex’s hand to his old house, and it’s like the finger pointing at the moon, he can’t see it beyond those anonymous white curtains, very simple, very IKEA, the metal fence, the wild dandelions -not pompously round and fragile before they fly away but golden, in bloom, yellow petals a little wrinkled after the last rain. He stares but he can’t really see it. He listens but he can’t really hear it.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought you would know, since, you know, I thought your parents would’ve told you. He bought the house from them three years ago. He’s lived there since then, I think?”

💔

There's a halo of tenderness surrounding Donghyuck, or it might just be the last of the golden hour shining on him before it dies. The swing in Mark's garden creaks in the late afternoon, and from the open window of the Garcia household comes the faint echo of an old Looney Tunes cartoon and a burst of laughter immediately followed by a motherly _sssh_.

It has been an incredibly warm winter, even for Cali standards, and it feels like August more than May, it feels like life is slipping through Mark's fingers, too fast for him to bottle it in the present. An ant has been climbing on Mark's pencil and slowly making its way towards the cap. He gingerly lowers it on the wooden table and looks up, towards Donghyuck, focused eyes, the dark, messy hair surrounding his face, a faint hum on his lips. He's sitting cross-legged on Mark's swing with a book open on his knees, his eyes going crossed with the effort of reading in Korean after so long. He must realize he's being watched because he looks up, eyes meeting Mark's.

"What?" he says, rubbing at his face, and Mark wants to look down and say, _nothing,_ but he doesn't. Two weeks ago Donghyuck wore his best outfit, his choir outfit, to come to prom with Mark. They came in late and skipped pictures so they wouldn’t draw too much attention, and in the end they mostly hung out with Jaemin, drinking spiked punch and judging everyone’s outfit. A lot of people without a date spend prom with their friends, after all. Except Mark asked Donghyuck to leave early so they could drive to the outskirts of the city, stop the car in a gravel road next to the woods, and kiss like their life depended on it. Donghyuck unravels so pretty when he wants to, kisses like someone who knows how to and wants to.

“Are you going to tell your parents?” he asked Mark.

The thought was honestly terrifying, but Mark was pretty sure his father knew already. They only have one computer in the house and there’s only so much you can do to delete your web history when your father is a tech assistant. As for Mark’s mother… she would have to understand. One of her sons already gave them grandkids, so at least that expectation doesn’t fall on Mark.

“Not now, later. They won’t let us stay in the same room if I tell them.”

Donghyuck was quiet. He pursed his lips. His bruised lips.

“Don’t tell them yet,” he said. “Your mom will tell my mom and my mom will tell my dad. I mean, he already knows, but I don’t want to fight about it again.”

“It’s okay, I don’t mind it keeping it to myself… I thought you liked both, though.”

“I tried both.”

“And which one do you like best?”

Mark felt more than saw Donghyuck’s smile.

“I’m not sure yet. I think I need to kiss more boys.”

Their hands found each other on the gear lever and Mark felt the nervousness in Donghyuck’s hold, the flirting a little shaky. Donghyuck was always flirty when it didn’t mean anything, but apparently when he cares it comes off a little choked, a little unsure. Mark wanted to kiss him again, so he did.

They have kissed a lot since then, usually in Mark’s room. But now, as sunset quickly approaches, Mark wants nothing more than to lean over and peck Donghyuck.

“I’m leaving for Yale in two months,” he says, instead.

“Yeah, Mark, I kind of guessed. It was only a matter of choosing between that and Harvard.”

“There was Berkeley too.”

“Well, I didn’t think you studied that hard just to go to UC Berkeley.”

“Doesn’t it bother you, that I’m going so far away?”

Donghyuck closes his eyes, looking like a cat basking in the sun, even if the sun has almost completely disappeared.

“Why should it bother me? You’re always going to come back anyway.”

The words stay with Mark long after Donghyuck has left, slouching next to the fence so that it would hide them from the streetlight, allowing him to drop a kiss on Mark’s cheek. He lies awake in his bed that night. He doesn’t really think he will always come back. He’s not going to the East Coast just so that he can come back to California, isn’t he? The thought haunts him for a few minutes. He really needs to talk to Donghyuck, he decides, just before he falls asleep.

💔

Mark ignores Alex Garcia’s curious and a little pitiful eyes as he fishes for the spare key inside the koi carp pot next to the door. It’s always been there and he knows Donghyuck would’ve left it there, out of habit rather than anything else. He doesn’t even ring the bell this time. He just gets inside and slams the door shut at his back. If Donghyuck wants to fine him for trespassing, well, have a seat, Mark _is_ a lawyer. He’s also Donghyuck’s husband. And this is the house where they grew up together. He has mitigating circumstances.

The house is dark because the sky outside is dark. Inside the kitchen, the low buzz of a new refrigerator, one of those smart machines who can phone-call, welcomes Mark. He hears Donghyuck’s unmistakable laughter coming from upstairs. He must still be livestreaming.

Now, Mark has done some very questionable and shitty things in his twenty-seven years of life. The way he dumped Donghyuck without an explanation is at the very top of the list, but this, this is definitely going to make at least top three.

He takes a deep breath, listens for a moment to Donghyuck’s voice rambling something about an annoying game dynamic in some game. He sounds so engrossed in what he’s saying - he sounds so happy. He’s still wearing the ring, Mark knows because Donghyuck streamed yesterday too and he flashed it a few times. (And of course some of his followers noticed it and asked him about it but he didn’t answer.) There’s a high chance he did it on the small probability Mark would watch the stream too and see it, which he did, because he is a petty little shit like that.

In the end, it all boils down to this, pettiness. Their life together was over years ago. Maybe not the physical or romantical attraction, that’s still quite alive and kicking, but after their breakup they both moved on, made their own career, dated other people. Their little meeting in Las Vegas could’ve been but a hitch in the greater state of things, just like rubbing one good last one off each other, having sex to scratch that itch in their lives that was the absolute apex of compatibility they could only reach once with each other as teenagers (at least Mark assumes Donghyuck didn’t find any other better or more fulfilling sex somewhere else, because Mark himself didn’t, and that would at least partly explain what happened in Vegas).

The point is, they could’ve walked out of each other’s lives, like railways hurrying to different directions after a train crash. They’re here, Mark is here, once again, because Donghyuck could not let go. He’s here because of Donghyuck’s pettiness, so it’s only fair - _it’s only fair_ \- that he is as equally petty, to make sure that this time Donghyuck lets him go for good.

That’s why he collects the last crumbles of Korean he has left after almost a decade of speaking mostly English, knocks on the door, and announces, in his stilted Korean, to FullSun’s hundreds of thousands of online streamers. “Darling, I’m home.”

💔

They go to the lake the day before Donghyuck’s birthday. Not Mark and Donghyuck, Mark and his friends in the senior year, but Renjun sneaks in with his cousin Lucas and Jeno’s girlfriend comes with her older sister so Jeno tags along too, and apparently Jaemin’s prom date prom didn’t really mind Jaemin tagging along too, so Mark has absolutely no qualms about taking Donghyuck with him.

They don’t take any pictures because Donghyuck forgot to charge his camera before they left, but Mark snaps a few shots with his phone, Donghyuck’s beauty shining through the shitty quality as he stands over a rock, arms open like he is the king of the world.

“Put away your phone, Lee, the water is amazing,” Donghyuck calls, and Mark smiles and runs up to join him. It’s the last pic of Donghyuck he will take. (They were never big on picture taking, between the two of them. Donghyuck liked to live in the present, not in lingering images.) Still, Mark will remember this day in muted colors, faded away under the bright first afternoon light, not a cloud in sight, the sun shining through the trees, Donghyuck falling asleep on his lap after lunch, the long shadow of his eyelashes on his cheeks, the chirping of cicadas, the gentle sloshing of the water, Renjun’s bright laughter when he won at cards - he laughed so hard he woke Donghyuck up, and he pouted, drowsy and confused, before hiding his head under the hem of Mark’s shirt.

The ride back feels like something is ending, but also like it could last forever, all trees and stars and Donghyuck’s quiet humming over the radio. They stop at a drive-in and buy fries because Mark feels like it, and Donghyuck feeds them to Mark while he drives, pretending to miss his mouth every time.

“Stop being a menace, we’re going to get into an accident,” Mark murmurs, trying to bite Donghyuck’s hand when a fry pokes him on his chin.

“You can’t get into an accident if you’re driving too slow to be considered moving.”

Mark rolls his eyes and resists the urge to brake suddenly just to get Donghyuck to shut up. Midnight comes when they’re twenty minutes away from Heatherfield and Donghyuck has dozed off to Airplanes by B.o.B., part of an old summer mixtape he made for Mark two years ago.

“Donghyuck, Donghyuck-ah,” Mark calls, slipping into Korean because he knows it makes Donghyuck happy.

“Mh, what? Are we here?”

The answer comes in Korean too, because even if it’s been years it’s still Donghyuck’s first language and the one he talks when he’s drunk or sleepy.

“Happy birthday.”

Donghyuck’s smile is wide and unguarded. He checks his phone.

“You were the first this time,” he says, switching back to English. “Jaemin sent one at midnight but I heard yours first, so I’d say you win.”

“And what do I win?”

“It depends,” Donghyuck murmurs, so low Mark strains to hear it. He tries to turn off the radio but Donghyuck stops him, afraid of the silence, or of being heard. He’s not looking at Mark when he asks. “How tired are you? I was thinking… I could stop at your place tonight.”

And Mark, Mark is glad the radio is still singing of airplanes and shooting stars, because the silence that follows would’ve swallowed him whole.

“I… Do you want to have sex?”

“I was thinking about that, yes. It’s my birthday, you’re leaving at the end of summer. I wanted to, if you want.”

Mark nods.

“I want,” he says.

“Then… your place?”

Mark thinks of his parents sleeping two rooms away. He hopes Matthew’s room and the bathroom will be enough to give them some kind of privacy.

“I’ll have to tell my mom I’m back and you’re staying the night or she might come to check up on us and then we’ll have to explain why the door was locked.”

“Okay.”

“And we’ll have to be real quiet, Donghyuck.”

“I can be quiet.” Mark sends him a dubious glance and he pouts. “You can gag me if I’m not.”

“I really want to gag you right now.”

Donghyuck laughs, but it’s a little too nervous. They don’t say anything else until Mark is pulling over in front of the gate, careful not to block the exit for when his dad leaves tomorrow. They tiptoe inside, past the kitchen, where the old refrigerator is rumbling in a corner. It smells like _kimchi_ and sesame oil, like home, and Mark will come to miss it.

His parents are already upstairs and Mark knocks on their door to let his mom know he’s back.

“Donghyuck is staying the night, we’re going to watch a movie in my room.”

“Yes, dear,” she replies faintly. He leans down so he can kiss her cheek and by the time he’s out she’s already asleep again. His father didn’t wake up at all.

They take turns washing their face and brushing their teeth and when Mark comes back Donghyuck is sitting on the bed, his back straight like he’s getting ready for a job interview. Mark sits next to him and takes a deep breath before he turns to lay a short kiss on his lips, his heart feeling like it’s going to burst. They showered at the facilities at the lake, but Donghyuck still smells a little like woods, like he lay down on the grass for hours, which he did. His hands go to the hem of his shirt.

“I’ve never taken my clothes off for another man,” he murmurs. Quiet, like Mark told him to.

“Me neither.”

He can hear every rustle, every button popping open, and Donghyuck is the one taking his clothes off and kicking them away but Mark feels like he’s the one being unveiled, his skin pulled to the side to reveal the mess of pulsing blood in his body, the raw flesh, the frantic quickening of his heart and swelling of his cock in his pants.

“Come here,” Donghyuck says, and Mark falls into him, into the sugar paper sheets, into the smell of the beginning of summer, into a moment that feels like it could last forever and is gone before Mark could even hold it in his hands.

> _press another chance pearl-bright and gentle into your hand. you don't need to look, don't have to break the sea-ice enough to breathe until you're sure there's sunrise on the other side. i'll stand holding some shadow-shift hope and wishing for what you deserve. how do i tell you that i don't want a future where you're not smiling?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See you next week with chapter three 💙


	3. Blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! tags have been updated so please check them! this chapter contains descriptive sexual content so make sure it's content you would like to read.  
> also i want to say a big thank you to all the readers who left a comment. i know it's not as pressing to leave comments when you know the next chapter has already been written so the writer doesn't need encouragement to write, and i wasn't expecting this fic to get many comments, but you really were super supportive and i can't thank you enough for that.

> _how many times can you turn the knife in yourself before the pain is enough? call your own death darling like it’ll come sweeter if you treat it tender._

In Donghyuck’s defense, he handles it very well. He only splutters for a moment, then replies in his, honestly much better than Mark’s, Korean, a woolly, “ _Jagiya_ , sweetheart, let me finish the stream, would you?”

Mark smiles at him.

“Am I on camera?” he asks, and Donghyuck shakes his head.

“No, but you could come here and introduce yourself if you wanted.”

Mark shakes his head coldly and sits on a couch on the other side of the room, away from the camera.

“Ah, the comment section is exploding. An old friend came to visit me, so I might have to end the stream early today.” Donghyuck laughs. “No, he’s definitely not my boyfriend. The ring? It’s cute, isn’t it? I got it in Las Vegas. You should watch the vlog of that trip, I had a lot of fun with Felix.”

Mark snorts and Donghyuck smiles sweetly at the camera.

“It seems like my guest is eager to have all my attention, so we’ll see each other tomorrow. I might post the third part of the TLOU’s gameplay tonight or tomorrow if you missed me playing that on Twitch two weeks ago. I’m just finishing the editing. Thank you sunflower97 for your donation. And thank you all for watching, have a nice day or night, and see you tomorrow!”

There’s a moment of silence and Donghyuck waving before he presses a few buttons and sighs. Then he sends Mark the angriest smile he’s ever seen.

“Next time you try something like that I’ll paste your stupid face all over my social feed.”

“You would need a pic of us together to do that. One possibly taken in the last eight years.”

“Who says I don’t have one?”

“Oh, so you took pictures of us having sex? The court will be delighted to know that while I was piss drunk and incapable of consenting, you were sober enough to record it. It will look amazing on my divorce lawsuit.”

“Oh, is that why you came here? Already working on your summation, Mr. Lee?”

“I came here because you’re an asshole, Donghyuck, and you deserve to have that said to your face. You’re a fucking petty asshole, living in my house, refusing to move on with your life, organizing this little Las Vegas circus just for a pathetic chance to cling onto me once more.”

He can see Donghyuck falter, like he was just physically hit.

“I want you out of this house. My house. Which I bought with my own money. I only want to see you on the day of the ruling and never again. Get out.”

“Sign the papers. I have them in my car. Then I can get out and you’ll never see me again. No ruling, no lawsuit. You clearly hate me, Donghyuck, so stop playing games. Let’s put an end to this.”

He takes one step towards Donghyuck and Donghyuck takes one step back. He looks so small, still in his sleeping shirt, fluffy and barefaced, and Mark is wearing a suit and leather shoes and a Rolex and he knows he looks fucking intimidating like this, and yet Donghyuck is the fucking millionaire between them, almost like in the songs they used to sing.

“Sign the papers, Donghyuck.”

“I won’t. I don’t want to. I don’t think you deserve it. It’s too easy, you know, to just play with people’s feelings and leave without an explanation. That’s what you did last time and now what? You want the easy out again, signing the papers, giving them to your lawyer, letting someone else handle this mess so that you don’t have to think about it and you can treat me as another pebble on your road to success?”

“It’s not like that…”

“It is exactly like that!” Donghyuck screams. “It took a fucking blackmail over a drunken marriage to get you to come talk to me, you never visited for eight years! Didn’t come back for Christmas or for summer, didn’t answer my messages, you completely erased me from your life… Fuck you, we were best friends too!”

“I was letting you get over it!”

“Yes, this excuse holds for, what, six months, one year? I got over you! And you still never came back. So don’t tell me this bullshit that it was for my sake, you were just an asshole and you don’t deserve the easy way out this time.”

Donghyuck’s lips tremble and he exhales, long and deep, covering his face with his palms as he sits back on his gaming chair. Mark lets him regain his breath.

“Who told you I was here? Renjun? Jeno? I know Jaemin wouldn’t.”

“Johnny. He said you’re being unreasonable and he’s tired of dealing with us. He thinks we can fight it out between us.”

Donghyuck scoffs, murmurs something that sounds awfully like _traitor_. It’s a little unfair. Johnny is not a traitor, he’s just neutral. And Donghyuck doesn’t like being called on his shit, especially when he’s already aware of it.

“I don’t want to fight with you. I want you out. You can’t just barge inside my house and force me to talk to you. I don’t want to have to see you right now. Contact me through my lawyer if you want to meet me.”

“Didn’t you hear that? Your lawyer is washing his hands of us. Johnny is not going to play messenger for our dumb fight.”

“Then use _your_ lawyer, unless you’re your own lawyer, which I doubt you can be since you’re still a junior member of the firm. Now get out.”

He gets up and opens the door, but Mark doesn’t move one inch.

“So this is how you’re going to play it? You just want to make things difficult for the sake of it? I know you, Donghyuck, you don’t do shit for nothing, especially shit like this.”

“You haven’t seen me in eight years.”

“I saw you less than a week ago.”

Donghyuck shakes his head, not meeting Mark’s eyes.

“You want that explanation I never gave you eight years ago, don’t you?” Mark asks, coming closer, and this time Donghyuck doesn’t back off. He stands his ground. “Or an apology maybe? Want me to tell you how much of a heartless asshole I’ve been to you? Because I can do that.”

“Fuck your explanation,” Donghyuck explodes again. “I don’t want your forced apologies. I came to your house and you didn’t tell me shit back then. I don’t want it anymore.”

So he wanted it, and now he doesn’t want it anymore. Which means he still wants it but he’s too proud to ask for it again or even just accept it, even if Mark’s offering.

“So what is it that you want?” he asks, low, and it’s only when Donghyuck’s eyes move up from his chest to his face that he realizes that, with a close-range fighter like Donghyuck, getting close is actually always a trap.

Donghyuck puts his hands on Mark’s chest, fingers nimbly testing the knot of Mark’s necktie, tightening it just on the verge of uncomfortableness. His lips disappear as he sucks them inwards before releasing them with a wet sound. His hands tremble at Mark’s neck.

“Have sex with me. One last time. When we’re sober. Then you can get your papers signed and go back to your anonymous apartment and your smog and high rate crimes and we’ll never meet again.”

“Eight years of waiting for an explanation and you ask for sex instead?”

Donghyuck closes his eyes.

“You were right. Eight years is so long it doesn’t even matter anymore why you did what you did. You’re hot and I want to fuck. And then you can leave and take your East Coast attitude away with you. What do you say?”

Mark’s hands close over Donghyuck’s, still resting on the knot of his necktie. He loosens it and lets Donghyuck slide it down until it falls on the floor.

“I have the weekend off. Let’s give you this honeymoon, if that’s what you want.”

💙

“Not there.”

The door to Mark’s room is locked, the handle clicking emptily when he instinctively tries to drag Donghyuck there.

“I don’t use that room,” Donghyuck explains quickly. Whatever surfaces on Mark’s face at those words, it sours Donghyuck’s too. “You wanted me to sleep in your bed like I still missed you?”

“You’re the one living in my house, you have no room to talk.”

“I have all the room I need to talk since this house is mine.”

It feels almost paradoxical to go to his own parents’ room to have sex, but Donghyuck pushes and pulls Mark past Matthew’s room - now his study - and the toilet and into the master bedroom, where Mark sighs in relief at the sight of the new furniture.

“Come on,” he says, tugging on Donghyuck’s shirt. He feels hungry. “Off.”

Donghyuck looks three seconds away from snapping back but Mark pushes him on the bed, sneaking his hands under the fabric and pulling it up. Donghyuck is warm and tense and shivers when Mark climbs over him, hands resting over his hips.

“Too fast, fucking kiss me at least.”

Mark laughs at him and bends down to kiss Donghyuck’s throat where the shirt is all bunched up against the skin, his tongue licking under the fabric, feeling Donghyuck’s Adam apple bob when he swallows. Donghyuck’s hands crumple his shirt, pulling it from the edge of his pants.

“Come on,” Donghyuck says, echoing Mark. “Off.”

That’s when Mark kisses him.

It’s not a good kiss. He catches Donghyuck mid-word and there’s more sucking than actual kissing, uncoordinated and mindless as Mark tries to get rid of his shirt while Donghyuck works his belt.

“You’re an insufferable little shit,” Mark murmurs, before he dives into the kiss again, this time with teeth, just as his belt clicks open, Donghyuck’s legs trying to spread under his own. “You make me so mad.”

 _You make me so mad._ Mark told Donghyuck that in Las Vegas, when they came back to the hotel. He remembers Donghyuck’s velvet choker and how it had stayed on until that moment, Mark pulling on it until the cheap fastening gave up. Donghyuck’s answer today and back then is the same.

“What are you gonna do about it?”

“I’m gonna fuck you,” Mark answers. “And then I’m gonna feel good about fucking a millionaire, what do you say about that?”

Donghyuck kicks away his own pants but then suddenly draws back when Mark takes out his half-hard dick. Mark watches him sigh in what seems to be frustration and bangs his head on the pillow, covering his face with his hands.

“Everything okay? You’re regretting it already?”

“No, shut up and get off. I need to use the toilet if you’re really going to fuck me.”

“Oh.” Mark rolls off him, then frowns. “You asked me to fuck.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting you to fucking attack me right when I asked. I wasn’t expecting you to say yes at all.” He rubs his face with the heel of his palm. “Or to show up, by the way.”

Mark tucks himself back inside his pants, feeling his rage resurface.

“And what exactly should I have done when you refused to sign the papers? Tell me, Donghyuck Lee, because this keeps looking like an elaborate plot to get me to finally pay attention to you. After eight years I thought you had moved on.”

“I have moved on! I have a career, I have a house of my own-”

“Of _my_ own, you mean.”

Donghyuck pulls himself up and sends Mark a look so poisonous for a moment Mark thinks he’ll get kicked out and goodbye sex _or_ divorce papers, see you in court in three years Mark, just because you can’t keep your mouth shut.

“Shut up,” says Donghyuck instead. “You have no house of your own because you’re a fucking dick who left. I bought this house when your parents were struggling to move out and needed money immediately, I fucking helped them because they were like family to me. You’d know that if you had bothered to talk to them back then. But you’re a piece of shit and you won’t make me feel bad for this, of all things.”

He gets up and Mark watches him shimmy back into his pants. He hovers awkwardly, cursing Donghyuck and himself for getting in this stupid situation. It’s not too late to back out, but…

“Is the sex thing still on? I’d like to know if it is because I drove directly from the airport and I’m starving.”

Donghyuck sends him a long, considering look.

“Order takeout for two. There are fliers stuck on the fridge. We’re gonna eat, and then we’re gonna have sex. And then you’re gonna leave. Is that okay with you?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever,” Mark says back, but Donghyuck has already left towards the toilet, slamming the door at his back extra hard. Mark sits on the edge of the bed for like one minute, imagining Donghyuck doing the same on the edge of the bathtub, trying to process what the fuck just happened.

It’s like they have a switch, on and off, and as soon as he sees a sliver of Donghyuck’s skin he wants to fuck his brains out, the rest of the time he’d gladly strangle him or himself. Excluding the rage and the sex, it’s no different from what he felt during high school, right before he had the guts to ask Donghyuck out to prom. Unsettled, this boy makes him feel unsettled. Still the same, after eight years.

It’s only when the water starts running that he finally finds the resolve to get up and walk downstairs.

💙

It’s Donghyuck who introduces Johnny to Mark.

“A friend of my brother,” he says. “He’s doing law school at Yale. I thought you might be interested in talking to him.”

Johnny just summons himself in Heatherfield one day in the middle of June, a few days after Donghyuck’s birthday, riding a nice but quite old car and sporting an expensive watch and a quiet confidence that lures people in like a blue flame. His handshake is firm and sure, and Mark finds himself shaking back just as tight, almost as if he has something to prove, and introducing himself as Mark Lee, a Yale PolSci freshman the upcoming semester.

“Political science, hm? Been there, done that. If you ever need anything you can call me whenever you want. Taeyong’s friends are my friends, after all.”

Johnny is tall and smiley and easy-going and everything in him screams he’ll get exactly where he wants to be in life. It’s not really clear what’s his connection with Taeyong - this skinny, hungry old soul working twenty-three odd jobs, fighting against life in a small town in Northern California and some relatively well off young man from the Midwest who’s planning to become a shark in New York, why do they even know each other?

Johnny explains it to Mark himself, as they watch Donghyuck and Taeyong bicker over the barbecue.

“Our moms were friends in Korea. When the Lees first came to the States they stayed at our place for a while. Donghyuck was so small back then. He only knew Korean. I taught him English in the beginning. Taeyong and I would piggyback him and tell him the name of everything we could see.”

“So you kept in touch?”

Johnny laughs at that.

“Absolutely not, we were like… nine? Ten? Our moms did, but yeah, no, we didn’t. But Taeyong came to Chicago for a summer job two years ago and he stayed at our place for a month. It was… nice… to see him again. We’ve kept in contact since then.”

Mark asks him a few questions about uni. In and off-campus accommodations, courses, subjects. He doesn’t want to come off as starved for information but he kind of is. He already researched everything, but he has no idea of what’s waiting for him on the other side of the country. Johnny answers all his questions patiently, at least until Donghyuck waltzes between them to offer them watermelon slices. He gives two to Mark and only one to Johnny before he saunters back inside to hang with Jeno and Jaemin at the window.

“Quite the preferential treatment, hm?” Johnny says, with a knowing smile.

“He’s my best friend.”

“Sure thing, and I guess your girlfriends gave you both matching hickeys.” Mark tries to cover his collarbone but his hands are full of watermelon right now. “You ain’t slick kid, not slick at all. I hope you haven’t defiled Taeyong’s brother before he was even eighteen.”

Mark blushes redder than the watermelon.

“I didn’t! We waited for his birthday,” he confesses, in a sudden rush of honesty.

“How responsible of you. I like this energy.”

The chatter in the garden dies down for a moment as Mark zeroes on Donghyuck hanging from Jeno’s shoulder as they sit down on the porch, Jaemin peeking from behind them as they all look at something on Jeno’s phone.

“Donghyuck likes it too,” Mark murmurs and Johnny guffaws so hard half of the garden turns to look at them.

He winks at Taeyong and moves closer to Mark, lowering his voice.

“Yeah, I can see he does. I mean, everyone who has eyes can see it. What about you? Do you like him?”

Mark draws back, feeling a little cornered.

“Wow, man. Why does it feel like you’re giving me the brother speech? Shouldn’t Taeyong do it?”

“Nah, he’s too nice to do that properly.”

“So what, are you going to play the bad cop number on me?”

Johnny clicks his tongue. “He’s just worried, I guess. His brother likes you a lot, but in a month you’re going to be on the other side of the country, a university freshman, out of sight out of mind they say, don’t they?”

It takes a moment for Mark to understand where this is going.

“I wouldn’t do that to Donghyuck!” he exclaims, and Johnny shushes him.

“I’m not saying you would, you seem as smitten about him as he is about you. It’s just that… University is hard, kiddo, especially this university, especially if you want to keep high standards, and you seem the kind of person who would. And you’re going to be overwhelmed with new experiences. It’s not easy to preserve long-distance relationships in those conditions. Maybe you should talk to Donghyuck about it a little, don’t you think?”

“I… I have been meaning to.”

“You should, because as far as I’ve gauged by talking with you for thirty minutes, you really dream big. And don’t get me wrong, I like that in a dude, Mark, I really do, but Donghyuck has no plan of moving out of this little town, not even for you. And it feels like you’re going into this with completely different expectations, you know?”

Mark’s stomach drops. Donghyuck catches it from inside the house through the open window and raises a worried eyebrow at him. Mark shakes his head to reassure him and collects his expression enough to smile.

“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a new relationship,” he murmurs, under his breath.

Johnny smiles, at him, the smile of a shark, the same smile he’ll use in court for the rest of his lawyer career.

“New relationship? I thought you guys were best friends.” He pats Mark’s back. “Cheer up, kid, I really like you. So, I guess it’s my duty to distract Yongie so you can sneak out with his brother, isn’t it?”

💙

“I can’t believe Johnny would do this to me.” Donghyuck takes a loud sip of his soda. “I can’t wait to ruin his marriage life before it even begins, really.”

“You can’t really blame him for telling me. We work together. Plus, you reacted poorly. He shouldn’t have to pick up your mess, you’re like twenty-five and refusing to sign divorce papers like a child stomping his feet down.” Mark frowns, looking at his burger as his mind finally processes. “Wait, what marriage life?”

Donghyuck takes his time to answer and when he does he looks way too smug.

“It must be so frustrating, always being the last to know shit, hm?”

“Oh, you tell me about frustration, Peter Lee.”

Donghyuck kicks him under the table. Mark is tempted to kick back but he tells himself he’s a junior lawyer in a good firm, not someone who has made an entire career out of playing games and refusing to face his feelings. (He ends up doing it anyway because he might not play games, but just like Donghyuck he’s also guilty of refusing to face feelings.)

“Johnny is getting married in three months,” Donghyuck finally tells him.

“What? No. He didn’t even tell me.”

“If you still don’t get it, you’re not exactly invited.”

“Why would I not be invited to the wedding of my boss, who’s also my friend?”

“Well,” Donghyuck says, soft, almost languid, “for starters the other party getting married is my brother. And I’m his best man. And you are, let’s say, _persona non grata_ to us.”

He puts down his bagel like he’s scoring the goal of victory and smirks.

“It’s Latin, it means you’re not welcome.”

“I studied Law, thank you, I know what it means. Wait, so Johnny is dating Taeyong? What? Why? Since when? _How?_ ”

Donghyuck’s smirk turns into a glare that turns into a tired sigh.

“With effort, I guess. They did long distance for two years before he had enough money to support Taeyong into moving to New York with him. They started dating more or less around when you broke up with me.” For a moment, Donghyuck stalls, puckering his lips around the straw as he decides where to cut with surgical precision. All the warning Mark gets is an almost casual glance, before Donghyuck guts him open. “You see, people who actually want to be with other people manage to find a way.”

And here it is, Donghyuck Lee, eight years after being dumped on Mark’s backyard lawn. Probably eight years of tasting this exact sentence on the roof of his mouth, tossing and turning in his bed at night hoping to find a chance to throw it back in Mark’s face. It’s difficult not to think he organized all of this just for that sentence to be said in the right circumstances. It’s just too perfect.

Mark is a lawyer, he’s used to getting his way even when he’s in the wrong. He’s so good at it he managed to make a profession out of it. This time, though, the defeat is so deafening and complete he cannot find anything in himself he would like to say. He just feels bad. Angry, ashamed, tired, stupid. Bad.

“I thought it was the right thing. Johnny said it was the right thing.”

“You weren’t dating Johnny. You were dating me, but you talked about this with anyone but me. You just. I don’t know. You left.”

It would be easier if Donghyuck was screaming. Instead, he just sits at the table, lazily shaking the empty can of soda, a plastic straw bumping into his chin and he doesn’t even seem to realize from how hard he’s staring at Mark.

Mark puts down his food too.

“That’s unfair. I tried talking about it with you. We only ended up fighting.”

“Oh, yes, and then you broke up with me and left. That was the poorest reaction to a fight I’ve ever seen.”

“You want me to say I was an asshole?”

“I wanted you not to be an asshole.” At this point, Donghyuck sounds more tired than angry at least. He has that kind of ruffled look, like he just wanted to stop thinking, like he wanted to be taken care of - the look he had after weeks spent preparing for tests he didn’t care about, when he just wanted Mark to tuck him close and pet his hair. “Johnny says you’re actually a decent person when it’s not about me, but I never cared about how you were to other people, I just wanted you not to be an asshole to me. You said I was the only one who mattered, and then you broke my heart.”

He clinks the empty can against Mark’s untouched one.

“Cheers.”

💙

Summer gets stuck for two weeks that June, the happiest two weeks of Mark’s life. It’s summer, and it will always be _that summer_ in Mark’s memories, no matter the year, no matter the place, every single instance of Mark’s childhood is set on that summer, like a song caught on repeat, over and over again. It becomes the soundtrack of Mark’s past, a single moment dripping on every other memory, contaminating it. It’s the summer of all summers, the year is 2012, the year the world ends. (Something does end, and it’s not the whole world, just Mark’s.)

Mark and Donghyuck fight in the most stupid place, the parking lot of the pool, right after Donghyuck gets off his job with big news.

“Simmons is quitting,” he says as a greeting after he enters the car. He climbs over the gear shift to land a loud kiss on Mark’s cheek. “I’ll probably be the manager next year.”

“Next year?” Mark frowns. “Will you still be working here next summer? You’ll probably be busy with college documents and moving out.”

“Oh,” Donghyuck says. “Ah, yeah.”

The CD player turns to life when Mark starts the car. It’s still the same playlist Donghyuck burned for Mark two years ago, the one with _SUMMER 2010_ scribbled in blue sharpie over the CD in Donghyuck’s messy handwriting, giant circles and short sticks. An Ohio indie rock band sings about waiting for summertime, but for Mark it’s the opposite. He’s waiting for summertime to end so that he can start anew, away from this ghost town.

Donghyuck rolls down the window.

“The AC is on,” Mark nags, but Donghyuck just turns it off.

“It’s cool outside. It’s probably gonna rain this weekend.”

It’s true, Mark realizes. The air smells like ozone, like impending rain crashing over this illusion of an endless sunny summer.

“Will they close the pool if it rains? My parents are in Sacramento to visit Matthew this weekend. You could stay over.”

“As if I’m not staying over even when they are there.”

“Yes, but you could be _loud_.” Donghyuck doesn’t answer, just sends Mark one of those go-on-and-I’ll-destroy-you looks. Mark always scolds him for being too loud when they do things. It annoys him to no end.

“I’m not teasing you, okay? I just thought it would be nice, you know. To not worry about them for once. Since I’m leaving soon. I wanted to do that.”

The sentences trip into each other, clumsy. Mark has always been so good with words, he was debate club vice-president and everything. Goodness, he wishes to go into law, of course he needs to be quick with words. Donghyuck, though, Donghyuck ties him up. Especially when he looks at him like that. He looks hungry, and it would be easy to just read him as hungry, but Mark knows it’s never that easy with Donghyuck. The only easy thing is getting him wrong.

The song is ending when Mark stops at the red light. It’s in those few moments of resonance, right before the new song starts, that Donghyuck talks.

“I don’t think I’ll try for any university next year.”

Mark turns to look at him, but Donghyuck is looking ahead. He frowns after a moment, still not looking at Mark.

“It’s green, you should go.”

“What do you mean you’re not going to university? What are you going to do?”

“Find a job, I don’t know.”

“What kind of decent job would hire you without a degree? You can’t even be a kitchen boy on the East Coast without a degree.”

Donghyuck finally turns to Mark.

“Why would it matter? I don’t live on the East Coast, I can easily find a job here while I decide what to do.”

“I’m going to live on the East Coast,” Mark says.

“Well, congratulations.”

Mark groans frustratedly at the car in front of him for going too slow before he decides that fuck this, he needs to stop, so ignores any traffic rule and parks on the side of the street.

“What are you doing? Take me home,” Donghyuck protests.

“Oh, no, we’re going to talk about it.”

“We’re not talking about anything while you’re like this.”

“No, we’re talking about this, Donghyuck, because I leave for Connecticut in ten days and we’re going to be in a long-distance relationship for as long as I am in university, and if I really go for law in graduate school it’s gonna be a very long time, and I thought, I don’t know, that you would at least try to join me at some point.”

Donghyuck crosses his arms in front of his chest.

“This has nothing to do with that. I can move to wherever you are without a degree, you know?”

“No, you can’t. Without a degree, you won’t be able to find a job that’s remunerative enough to live a decent life. Do you want to be like your brother all your life?” The look Donghyuck sends him is cold enough to freeze hell. “Wait, fuck, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Too late, it’s already out. And it doesn’t matter if Mark takes it back, Donghyuck has sunken his teeth into it and he won’t let go. This is not something he can let go.

“Then how the fuck did you mean it? You think my brother is somehow worth less than anyone else just because he couldn’t afford higher education?”

“No, I don’t, you know I don’t-”

“You think not having an education makes _me_ somehow lesser than you?”

“Can you please shut up for a moment and listen to me?”

“I’m listening, Mark, I’m fucking listening. You’re saying some pretty nasty shit.”

“Let me fucking explain then!” Mark blurts out, but if he’s gunpowder, Donghyuck is fire. Donghyuck is always going to be the fire for him.

“Don’t use that tone with me, Mark Lee.”

“Then don’t jump to conclusions, Donghyuck Lee.”

“What conclusions? You’re here literally telling me that you’re, what, disappointed in me because I want to take a break from studying?”

“A break from what? You never literally do anything, Hyuck. You’re a fucking high school student and you’re failing half your courses! You think life is easy? Nothing will be handed to you, you gotta work hard, but you haven’t even started and you’re already talking about breaks.”

He realizes he’s gone too far when Donghyuck simply opens the door of the car and leaves without another word. He starts walking on the side of the road, his back to Mark.

“What the fuck are you doing? Come back here!”

“Fuck you,” Donghyuck answers, showing him the finger.

“Fuck, fuck,” Mark whispers. “Fuck.”

He also leaves the car and starts running after Donghyuck. He grabs his shoulder, spinning him back.

“Don’t touch me,” Donghyuck hisses, and Mark staggers but doesn’t let go.

“Listen,” he says, “I’m just worried about you. I want us to be together, you’re literally the most important person in my life, but I wished you had some kind of… I don’t know, a goal? A dream? Any kind of plan? Because I know where I’m going and it’s not a place you can get to just floating around and hoping you land there.”

Donghyuck slaps Mark’s hands away and takes a step away from him. A car passes by and they both instinctively move towards the edge, keeping the distance between them. The white lights show Mark Donghyuck’s face, and he realizes he needs to apologize, but when he opens his mouth Donghyuck beats him to it.

“Would you be ashamed of me?” he asks, staring dead into Mark’s eyes.

“What? No-”

“How are you going to introduce me to your friends from Yale? Oh, Donghyuck, meet the son of Senator Smith, and this is the nephew of a judge in the constitutional court! Guys, this is my boyfriend, he’s a cashier at Dunkin Donuts.”

“No, no, it’s not about that.”

“It seems like it is.”

Donghyuck sucks in his bottom lip and looks up, shaking his head.

“You’re such an idiot sometimes, Mark. Just because you’ve got everything already figured out you think you’re better than anyone else. Well, what about this, having good grades doesn’t fucking mean anything if you grow up to be such an asshole.”

“Well, you’re dating this asshole!”

“And do I look happy about that now?” Mark tries to answer but Donghyuck stops him. “Don’t. Just… Don’t. You’ve said enough today, and I don’t want to break up with you in the middle of the fucking street. I’m walking home.”

Mark curses himself _and_ Donghyuck. He watches his boyfriend walk a few meters before he calls out to him.

“Donghyuck! Fuck, come back! I won’t talk anymore, just get into the car. We’re still too far away.”

He sees Donghyuck’s shoulders slump. He stops. Then he turns back. He doesn’t look at Mark as they walk back to the car and during the whole ride home. Mark wants to apologize, but he doesn’t dare to. He knows Donghyuck would literally jump out of the car if he was angry enough. He looks angry enough.

When Mark stops in front of Donghyuck’s house, Donghyuck turns to pick up his backpack from the backseat and Mark tries to speak.

“Donghyuck, I’m sorry-”

Donghyuck leaves the car and slams the door right into Mark’s apology. And that’s how it goes.

_i’m feathering jasmine petals fragrant around my bones while you sing your copper-lined throat open. can’t keep a secret from you._

Mark undresses methodically, folding his clothes and leaving them on the chair next to the bed. He puts away his toothbrush and closes the suitcase before falling backward on Donghyuck’s bed, bouncing on the mattress and causing the springs under him to creak a little. It’s going to be loud, he realizes, fucking Donghyuck on this bed. They were never loud when they were teenagers. It was always muted, bitten lips and hands in front of their mouths to choke their moans. and small movements to keep the bedpost from hitting the wall, more about control than strength.

Mark’s hand ghosts up his cock and he palms himself lazily. There’s some kind of thrill in the thought of fucking Donghyuck in his parents’ bedroom loud enough to be heard downstairs. He kind of hopes he makes him wail too, something he was never able to do eight years ago. He always had the potential, choir’s second chair and everything. Mark’s cock agrees, twitching under his hand, sending a little shock through his groin.

He teases himself, light and easy, not wanting to get worked up too fast. Getting hard won’t be a problem with Donghyuck, but if he’s not careful he’s going to lose it too soon. He wants this to last. He wants, he realizes, for Donghyuck to think about this sex as the best of his life. Oh, Mark is going to show him.

“Getting started without me?” Donghyuck asks, honey syrupy, when he comes back. He’s completely naked, something Mark really appreciates. He’s also already hard.

“That was very cringe, baby,” he answers, pulling himself up. “You also started without me, so hypocritical too.”

Donghyuck snorts and throws Mark the bottle of lube, then climbs on the bed. They stare at each other, unused to the awkwardness between them. Not even their first time together had been this awkward.

“How are we going to do this?” Mark asks. “Should I get a condom?”

Donghyuck stares intensely at Mark’s cock for a moment.

“Are you clean?” he asks. “We kinda already didn’t use one in Las Vegas so it’s fine for me if you want to go raw.”

Mark nods.

“Then, we’re good I guess. Are you going to stare forever or will you come and kiss me?”

“I don’t know,” Donghyuck whispers, crawling closer, lowering himself onto Mark, skin damp and smelling like chamomile and lube.

“I don’t think you deserve it,” he continues, but he lets Mark surge up and kiss him anyway, latches his hands on Mark’s nape and ruts against Mark’s thigh.

Kissing is easy. Donghyuck is a fairly good kisser and Mark learned kissing from him. They know how they like it, soft at first, growing harder as it gets deeper, not too much spit, more lips than tongue. Compared to when he was younger, Mark likes to bite a lot more, his teeth nibbling at Donghyuck’s lips, his jaw, the meat of his shoulders. Donghyuck doesn’t complain, just spreads his legs wider, ruts down on Mark’s lap, looking for the drag of Mark’s cock against his rim. He’s wet down there, around the rim and down his groin, the lube dribbling down the softest part of his thighs, under the curve of his bottom. Mark collects it with his fingers and drags it back to Donghyuck’s rim, circling it with his thumb.

“Fuck,” Donghyuck hisses. “There’s no need to do that. I already lubed myself up in the shower.”

“So that’s what you were doing,” Mark says, as he sneaks one finger in. “Getting ready for me. Did you even need much preparation? I fucked you so well last week. So many times. I bet that left you loose for a while.”

Donghyuck grinds on that single finger, eyes squeezed shut, cock twitching against Mark’s bellybutton. He’s sensitive still, maybe more than when they were younger. Back then everything was overwhelming and tentative, but there’s a purpose in the way Donghyuck writhes around Mark’s index finger now, an awareness of his own pleasure that wasn’t there before.

He did finger himself well, he’s relaxed and wet and when he clamps down on Mark’s finger he doesn’t hiss in pain, just in urgency. That’s good, very good. Mark pulls his fingers out.

“Get on your back,” he whispers, and Donghyuck complies.

“There’s a pillow on the armchair,” he murmurs. Mark hums appreciatively and goes to pick it up, places it under Donghyuck’s hips.

“Comfy?” he asks, testing how far apart he can push Donghyuck’s legs to expose him. “Wow, you weren’t so flexible eight years ago.”

“I did a fitness challenge two years ago,” Donghyuck hisses, through gritted teeth. “There’s a whole playlist of me squatting every day for twenty minutes for one month.”

“Sexy, can’t wait to watch that.”

“Give me the views please,” Donghyuck moans. “Also would you fucking just put it in? I’m ready.”

“Hush, so impatient. When we have so much time.”

Donghyuck’s glare is rendered useless by Mark getting two fingers inside him, hooking them high up so hard Donghyuck’s whole body buckles and clenches around them.

“See, it was a little rude of you to play all by yourself. You got all wet and hot without me.”

Donghyuck lets out a low, affronted noise and Mark kisses it from his lips, tasting mint and spit. Higher, he wants to make him moan higher.

“I really like doing this, you know?” he says, conversationally, as Donghyuck squirms on his fingers. Clearly he has never been fingerfucked properly beyond the intent of preparing him for penetration. Oh, isn’t he missing out.

“Of course you don’t know, it’s something I discovered only after we broke up. Apparently I have a real talent for it, got stellar reviews and everything.”

Donghyuck clamps down on him with a yelp, his legs trying to close down on Mark’s fingers. It is adequately high-pitched but Mark can - and will - do better. He lets go of Donghyuck’s legs to stiffly, singlehandedly, squeeze a dollop of lube on his palm, then wraps it around Donghyuck’s cock. The sound Donghyuck lets out is wet and strangled, something that lives and dies in his throat.

“Mark, Mark wait, stop, stop,” he begs. There’s a thin layer of sweat on his chest, and if Mark had one more hand he would pinch his nipples because he remembers from that night in Las Vegas that he was so sensitive there too. But he only has two hands and Donghyuck is pulsing around them, under them, eyes closed, his body instinctively inching closer to Mark’s, seeking the comfort only naked skin can give naked skin.

“Is it too much for you?”

“Yeah, I’m going to come if you go on.”

He’s shivering, thighs quaking from the effort of staying spread, Mark’s fingers pressed deep inside him - Mark can almost see the pleasure in him, tingling, like sparks. He sees his stomach move, the way he tries to relax his muscles to slow down the impending orgasm, keep himself from bucking into Mark’s hold.

“Isn’t that the point? Don’t worry, Hyuck, I _will_ fuck you today. I’m planning on doing it more than once, if you can take it. I know I can do it.”

Donghyuck’s eyelashes flutter, his whole body flutters in a delicate way.

“I won’t get hard again easily after I come,” he murmurs.

“I’ll work very hard to make it happen then.”

He waits for Donghyuck’s nod before he moves again, but he already knows Donghyuck will say yes. He’s on the verge of coming, almost desperate for it, the only thing stopping him from giving in is the fear that Mark will consider it done once Donghyuck comes. Well, Mark has no intention of leaving until Donghyuck is _done_.

“You’re such an asshole even at this,” Donghyuck says, in the end. “Fuck, fuck, okay, just make me come.”

Mark laughs at his eagerness, rewards him by jerking him off for real, fast and tight, and fucking him for real, deep and harsh. There’s an art to doing this, and the art is recognizing when the other party is coming. Mark is good at reading bodies like books, but with Donghyuck it was never about reading. Mark wrote his name all over Donghyuck like he was not a body but a white canvas. He left his dirty footprints all over him, inside him, back when they were young, and now he’s going to write the masterpiece of his life on the space between Donghyuck’s thighs, so hard the ink is going to bleed through the page.

He fists Donghyuck’s cock like he did when they were teenagers, like it’s something dirty and secret, a quickie on the back of his car at dusk, and he fucks him with his fingers like he would with his cock, and when Donghyuck is coming, right before he does, when his body starts clenching and quaking, on the last steps before he falls, Mark slows down, his hands going almost still on Donghyuck’s cock while he pulls his fingers out. It’s not enough to quench Donghyuck’s orgasm, and that was never the goal. When Donghyuck comes, it’s the most frustrating, unfulfilling, exhausting and long orgasm of his life. Mark watches his rim squeeze on nothing, his cock pulsing white in Mark’s still hand, pinned there, unable to ride the wave, the only thing helping him through it is Mark’s hand softly squeezing around his cock when he squirts cum all over his belly. So little, and yet he clings onto it through the aftershocks.

“I hate you,” he mutters, only, “I fucking hate you.”

There are tears in his eyes. Mark would scoop them with his fingers, but they’re dirty with either lube or precome. He scoops Donghyuck’s cum instead, drags it from his stomach to Donghyuck’s perineum, then presses hard right there. Donghyuck’s cock jumps one last time, weakly releasing its last spurt of come as its owner writhes from the oversensitivity.

“You did so well, baby” Mark answers, leaning back to admire his handiwork. He tenderly moves Donghyuck’s hands away from his face to stroke his cheeks, the line of his jaw, Donghyuck’s bottom lip. He kisses Donghyuck with his fingers, letting him taste his own come on his fingertips, then leans down and kisses it with his lips.

💙

It’s not difficult to get Donghyuck hard again, it just takes an adequate amount of time.

Mark stays next to Donghyuck as he tries to regain his breath, holding him close, teasing him with butterfly touches and long kisses that toe the line between hypersensitivity and tenderness. He doesn’t dare to leave, not even to find a towel to clean Donghyuck of all the cum and lube splattered on his belly and dripping down his thighs. Donghyuck looks like he just free fell from the sky, crushed by gravity. He doesn’t need Mark’s absence to crush him too.

“Was it the first time?” Mark asks. “Did someone ever play with you like that? Breathe, Hyuck, deeply.”

Donghyuck breathes and breaks under the hands petting his side, shivers when they dig in the soft muscle of his abdomen.

“Usually people just fuck me,” he murmurs, shivering when Mark flicks his right nipple, then thumbs it slowly.

“Bet you never came as hard. But you still feel unsatisfied, didn’t you? Did you feel empty? You clenched pretty hard but there was nothing there to hold you down.”

Donghyuck covers his face to hide his blush, his whole body twitching with his cock. He’s not hard, not yet, but he’s going to get there.

“Although it’s quite surprising, that it was your first time doing something like that. I thought you would have more experience.”

Donghyuck tiredly slaps him. “I’m sorry if I didn’t have the wild sex no strings attached experiences during universities. I was too busy making a shitton of money, you know.”

“Even more reason not to have boring vanilla sex. There must be plenty of people trying to get into your pants now that you’re rich and famous.”

Donghyuck tuts. “Well, I value emotional connection more than whatever kinky thing you learned during law school.”

Mark’s eyebrows shoot up. It’s still too early to touch Donghyuck again, and anyway he would never do anything too wild with someone as inexperienced as Donghyuck is, but he mentally enjoys the fantasy of really edging Donghyuck, for hours, until he has no breathe to dispense his holier-than-thou higher moral wisdom about feelings.

“Well, I value the ability to tie people to the bed and tease them for hours. I bet you’d like that.” He leans down and whispers the last part right in Donghyuck’s left ear, revels in Donghyuck’s full-body shiver against his body. “I told you I would make you hard again, didn’t you?”

“I can’t go so soon,” Donghyuck whispers, desperate and angry, as he writhes against Mark, teeth gritted from oversensitivity rather than pleasure. “I need more time.”

“Then slow down, we have all the time.”

But Donghyuck can’t slow down, even if it hurts. He’s an impatient lover, almost reckless, the kind of gay who would split himself on someone’s dick for quick release, Mark can see it in the way he tries to rut against Mark’s thigh too soon for comfort, wincing at the friction, oversensitive.

“I’m not leaving,” Marksays, pinning Donghyuck down so that he stops, eliciting a noise of protest.

“I want you to fuck me,” Donghyuck says, so affronted, so offended.

“I want to fuck you too, but if we go at it again now it’ll hurt. You won’t be able to get fully hard.”

“Then maybe you should’ve fucked me earlier,” Donghyuck growls.

“And missing out on the chance of ruffling your feathers like this?” Mark pets his hair with a soft laugh, pulling his hand back when Donghyuck tries to bite on his fist. “Wow, he pecks too.”

Donghyuck glares but he’s too boneless and pliant for it to actually scare Mark. Mark leans down to kiss his cheek, but Donghyuck turns his head and catches his mouth at the last moment, bites his bottom lip to keep him there just enough to lick his hands behind Mark’s head and pull him on his mouth. Mark lets him deepen the kiss, hands settling on Donghyuck’s hips to keep him from bucking up too much.

“See? Now you’re getting there again, I told you I would’ve made it happen.”

“You? I’m the only one actually making an effort here.”

“My hard-working boy,” Mark says, with a smile, and then the smile freezes when Donghyuck goes rigid in his hands. Mark freezes too when he realizes what he’s just said.

“Sorry, sorry Hyuck, I wasn’t thinking.” He automatically cradles Donghyuck closer, soothing the hard, tense lines of his body. “I don’t know where it came from.”

“Please don’t say it again.”

“No, of course.” Donghyuck isn’t his boy anymore. He actually never was. Mark never called him that, not even when they dated. “It just slipped out.”

Donghyuck nods, allows himself to relax a little in Mark’s arms.

“You say it often? It came out pretty natural.”

It sounds petty, but at least Donghyuck doesn’t sound choked-sad anymore.

“No, not really. I don’t date seriously, so I have no reason to call anyone my boy. I… I actually never do that. It was just a fluke, I swear on my honor.”

“You’re a lawyer, you don’t have any honor.”

Well, true. _But I have money,_ Mark almost replies, before he remembers that would be a lost game against someone like Donghyuck.

“Do you?” he asks, instead. “Date seriously, I mean.”

Donghyuck takes some time to answer.

He settles on, “I’m not dating anyone at the moment.”

“Did you date someone seriously in the past? With the intention of settling down, I mean.”

“Isn’t that what people do? Date with feelings.”

“I don’t. Not since you.”

It’s the most honest Mark has ever been in years, but he’s in Donghyuck’s bed and they’re married. He can certainly spare him some honesty.

“Well, I did.”

He did. And then what happened? Mark wants to ask. Other than the boring sex, of course. But Donghyuck is pulling himself up, meeting Mark’s hips with a roll of his own.

He’s half-hard again, and moans deliciously when Mark closes his fist around his dick. Mark lets him thrust loosely in his hold, accompanying the movement with slow jerks of his lips. He stops only to lube his hand and makes the slide easier.

“Good?” he asks, and Donghyuck nods, then surprises Mark by jerking him off back, tighter than what Mark is doing and also uncomfortably dry. Mark gasps, rhythm faltering, and stops Donghyuck to jerk himself off with the lube dirty hand, just enough to get himself slick, before he leads Donghyuck’s hand there again.

It’s embarrassing how little it takes for him to go full hard again, but he had been staving it off for a long time so he doesn’t hold back, slips a leg between Donghyuck’s and holds him open, pressing himself into his body like he’s trying to bury him into the mattress.

It’s better now, compared to before. Donghyuck is more relaxed, more at ease. He’s still sensitive from coming earlier, which makes him a little louder, a little more relaxed, but his body is heavier, almost boneless, and softer than before. It feels fucking good.

“Ah, it would be nice if you could ride me now,” Mark murmurs, and Donghyuck snorts into his ear.

“You’re dreaming. I told you not to make me come. You’re gonna have to do all the work now.”

“Oh well,” Mark murmurs, as he kneels between Donghyuck’s legs, hands blindly finding the lube to add some more, just to be sure, “it’s not going to be such a sacrifice, darling, at all.”

💙

“It’s not the end of the world. We’re just going to have to make some sacrifices,” Mark’s mom says, hands in her hair as she stares at the mess of papers on the table. Opposite to her, her husband pushes his glasses up his nose as he picks up his phone again, staring at it like it’s its fault that his eldest son was reckless.

Mark’s eyes go back and forth between his parents.

“I can look for a part-time job,” he says, tentatively.

“And risk messing up your grades?”

Mark’s dad sighs tiredly.

“You already have enough debt for the next ten years, son. We have some savings on the side, hopefully it’ll be enough to help Matthew.”

“But dad…”

“Go to bed, Mark. This is not something you should worry about. Your brother made a bad call, but we’re his parents, if we can help him we will.”

“I want to help too!”

Mark’s mom clicks her tongue, sending her husband one of her sharp glances. Mark knows she’s going to scold his dad for talking about this stuff to him instead of solving it in private. But Mark is already nineteen, he’s going to move out soon. Yet, his parents still treat him like a baby.

“Come on, darling. If there was something to really worry about we would’ve told you ourselves,” she says, as she walks him upstairs.

“I don’t want to be a burden, mom.”

“You’re not a burden, sweetheart. You’re making us so proud. Your father and I couldn’t even dream of sending one of our kids to Yale, but you exceeded our expectations. And you did it all on your own. Don’t let your brother’s mistakes hold you back now that you’re so close to your dream.”

It’s not like that, really. Matthew is hot-headed and stubborn and sometimes a little too simple, but he’s family. Just because Mark is leaving, it doesn’t mean he has to leave everything behind. His mom must realize his uneasiness because she pets his head.

“If you’re really worried about us and you want to help out, the only thing you can do now and in the future is to study hard, keep your scholarship, finish your studies quickly and start working to pay off your own study loans. Then you can go anywhere, and we’ll be happy for you.”

“That sounds like a plan,” he says, with a smile.

“I’m not kidding, young man. You’re not going there to have fun. You can, of course, have all the fun you want, just as long as you do your duty and keep a good GPA. Don’t lose your way like your brother did.”

“Well, Matthew didn’t do so bad, in the end.”

She rolls her eyes to the ceiling.

“Your brother… Well, he did his best, but being so far away from home didn’t help him. Too much freedom and too suddenly can get to your head.”

Mark shrugs. “At least now he has Sarah to tie him down.”

“Yes, Sarah and the kid. Your brother couldn’t keep his hamster alive, I can’t even imagine him with a baby. At least this will make him finally grow up, I guess.”

Mark chuckles at the idea. Matthew and a chubby baby. He’s going to be an uncle soon, and he can’t wait to tell Donghyuck.

Except, he suddenly realizes, Donghyuck hasn’t talked to him since the last time they saw each other.

The radio silence has lasted three days. Mark will leave for university in a week. He has already started to pack his belongings, following his mom around as she makes lists and asks herself loudly if he would need this or that. He usually sighs loudly and lets her ramble when she gets like that, so nervous and anxious that she needs to compartmentalize things by writing them down, but she keeps insisting on asking his opinion, distracting him from his useless moping.

“Mark, is everything okay? You spaced out for a little.”

Mark shakes his head, looking at the open suitcase next to his bed - his father insisted on opening it last week to see _how many things we can fit in there_.

“I just… how are we going to pack all the stuff I need if we’re not going to Connecticut by car?”

She sits down on the bed. She looks suddenly tired.

“We’ll have to mail them to you. You might want to pack lighter, maybe just the stuff for fall and winter, and then you can pick up the rest when you come back for Christmas. I’ll tell your dad to send you some money to go shopping if what you’re bringing is not enough.”

Matthew’s shotgun wedding messed up everything and now their family car trip to Connecticut to take Mark to university has been canceled. He will go by airplane, on his own.

 _Get used to it,_ he tells himself. _From now on, you’re on your own._

“By the way, what did you tell Donghyuck?” she asks.

“Donghyuck?”

“Yes, your best friend, Donghyuck… Mark! Haven’t you told him yet?”

Donghyuck was supposed to come with them to Connecticut and stay with Mark a few days before coming back by airplane. The others had bought the return flight ticket for him for his birthday - he clearly wasn’t able to afford it on his own - but now he has no ride to Connecticut. And Mark hasn’t told him yet.

“I haven’t heard from him today,” he answers.

He actually tried calling Donghyuck’s house, and Taeyong told him Donghyuck was at Renjun’s. Which was a lie because Mark himself was at Renjun’s while he called.

“Well, you should tell him while he’s still in time to buy a flight ticket and come anyway or get a refund for the one they got him.”

Mark nods dutifully. He hazards a look outside. The light in Donghyuck’s room is on. It’s only one street away, happiness.

“Mom,” Mark calls, when she’s at the door.

“Yes?”

“Am I… Am I doing the right thing?”

She stares at him like she doesn’t recognize him.

“I mean… I’ve always wanted to leave, but I won’t be here when Matthew gets married, or when his baby is born. And if something happens I will be on the other side of the world. And my friends will be here and I’ll be gone. I… I’m just thinking this might not have been the best choice, being so far away. What if I end up losing more than what I gain?”

“Then you decide, what you want to lose and what you want to gain. The choice has always been yours, Mark. You got yourself into Yale, you could get yourself out of it, if you wanted. No matter where I tried to direct you, you’ve always done what you wanted, all your life you’ve been like this. My stubborn son who will do great things. The choice is yours, but, if you ask me, I think going is the best thing you could do now. You dream big, Mark, and this small city has always been holding you back. Just, whatever you end up doing, make sure you don’t have any regrets.”

No regrets. That’s easier said than done. Mark texts Donghyuck, he falls asleep at dawn and there’s still no answer.

💙

Sex was always something easy, something relaxing. Mark didn’t have to look too hard to find it and it didn’t leave any lasting consequence other than the levity in his shoulders when he came back to his apartment after fucking someone so good they cried.

Making people cry was enough. Mark didn’t look for relationships.

It’s not like he didn’t _believe_ in relationships - he believes in relationships and intimacy and domesticity and familiarity, he believes in getting to know someone like the back of your hand and wanting to wake up next to them forever. He tried, after Donghyuck. He dated a few people, tried to get serious with them. It just didn’t work out. There was always something missing, he would always compare them to Donghyuck and realize that they were never going to have something like that, and why try when you already know you won’t get what you want? No relationship is better than a half-assed relationship.

(Isn’t that why he broke things off with Donghyuck? No relationship is better than a half-assed relationship, even if it’s one with the love of your life.)

“Are you okay?” he asks, softly, holding Donghyuck up, holding him open. “Can I move?”

“Would you just fuck me already?” Donghyuck hisses, and Mark shakes his head - this brat - and does just that, bottoms out in a single thrust. It would be punishment for everyone else, but it’s just mercy for Donghyuck, who has been begging for it since the beginning while Mark fingered him, shallow and aimless, just for the sake of it. That, probably, was the punishment for him. But this, this is the relief, the glorious moans he grits out as he buries his face in the sheets, arms collapsing at his side, the way he relaxes to take Mark in and only down hard clenches on Mark’s cock to keep it in when he pulls back - only to fuck in again.

Sex with Donghyuck is not easy, it’s playing a game without knowing the rules and losing, it’s playing while knowing the rules and losing again because your opponent is just too good, too hot, too sweet, too much. Sex with Donghyuck is the complicated mess of balancing Donghyuck’s urgency with Mark’s instinct to drag this down, pinning Donghyuck’s hips to the bed so that Mark can set the pace because he knows he’s not going to last with Donghyuck’s pace.

“Harder, fuck, faster,” Donghyuck grits out, so demanding. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, when did you become such a sadistic asshole?”

“It comes with the law degree,” Mark tries to joke, but he’s already picking his pace up, just a little, just enough to get Donghyuck to shut up.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I had known you were into edging or whatever…”

Mark laughs at that, slapping Donghyuck’s butthole lightly, more noise than actual force, more startle than pain. “You call this edging? Oh, Hyuck, I would never do anything like that to you. Your prudish, cute butt wouldn’t be able to take it.”

He can feel Donghyuck’s annoyance curse through his whole body, clamping on Mark’s cock, but Donghyuck is too breathless to keep complaining. Mark leans into him, slides in even deeper, putting his weight down so Donghyuck can feel him in his throat.

“You’re too impatient for my games, sweetheart, you want everything and you want it now.” He licks the sweat from Donghyuck’s neck, rolls down into him without even pulling back. “You’d be too desperate to last until the end.”

“If you weren’t such an idiot we would be together, and you would’ve been able to find out for yourself. Now fucking make me come, asshole.”

Mark snorts to himself. That was… a fat lie. Donghyuck would probably be able to endure it, the problem is that Mark wouldn’t be able to do it to him. He’s too weak. Donghyuck is not one of the strangers he can make cry for hours, Donghyuck is Donghyuck and Mark would break at the first of his tears.

Even now, he gives in to Donghyuck’s wishes and his thrusts speed up, interrupting whatever nasty remark Donghyuck was going to spit at him. His grip on Donghyuck’s hips is tight, almost bruising, and the way he jabs into him is so rough Donghyuck’s legs give up and his upper half collapses on the bed, his ass staying up into the air only because Mark is keeping it there.

“Like this, so good, you’re so good, Donghyuck, Donghyuck.”

It’s too early, too soon, like being swept by a hurricane. Mark wants to stop for a moment, lay his head on Donghyuck’s shoulder and regain his breath, feel Donghyuck’s heartbeat echo into him through his dick. Sex was always something easy, something relaxing. Mark loves to be in control, he loves to make people feel good, but Donghyuck breaks all of that apart, turns him into a hormone-controlled teeager who just wants to grip harder, fuck deeper, faster, stronger, knees chafing against the sheet, and come with Donghyuck’s name on his lips.

Donghyuck tries to pull himself up on all fours so he can stroke himself, but he’s too exhausted, too excited, right on the edge, and he falls back down again. Mark slows down only enough to tilt Donghyuck’s head and lay a blind kiss at the corner of his lips. He finds Donghyuck’s cock and thumbs at the head.

“Are you close? Because I’m close.”

Donghyuck, eyes wide shut, mouth open, just a peek of tongue poking from his panting lips, tries to answer, but Mark kisses him again, suckles on his tongue - the angle is not good but it’s Donghyuck and it’s always good with him.

“Fuck,” Donghyuck murmurs, when Mark lets him go, curling on himself because he’s close, he’s so close, body shaking, toes curling, biting down on the pillow like it could keep him afloat during a storm.

It’s useless, because he’s going down, down with Mark, with Mark’s mouth on his nape, one hand around his dick, Mark buried so deep inside him he probably feels like he’s bumping into his heart. Mark feels him coming, and he tries to hold himself back, but no matter what kind of steel control he has, this is Donghyuck. It’s so easy, it feels so good to be swept away by his pleasure, to get lost in him.

Like drowning home.

> _the songs are still about the same daylight, but we’re on the other side of cruelty now. maybe we both owe ourselves a gentler version of the story, one where time learns to touch us softly. tie it with a ribbon and bury it in a garden. let’s see what grows from it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See you next week with the last chapter, pink 💕


	4. Pink

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry if I'm late, I was super busy for the past few days.  
> Thank you so much for the love and support ;;

> _you’re faithful like thistle honey, blushed with the sweetness of your own adoration._

Mark wakes up to pink and orange, sunset filtering between the curtains and drawing a golden hourglass on the dark wall, Donghyuck’s dark hair brushing his lips, his soft snore, the warmth he emits wherever their bodies are touching - everywhere.

Strangely, it reminds him of Vegas, even if it’s not the same at all. Donghyuck whines in his sleep when Mark disentangles himself from him - he curls into a ball to seek more warmth, already missing Mark’s. Mark pulls the comforter over his naked body, considers waking him up to shower but decides against it. He will probably have to leave as soon as Donghyuck is fully conscious and he’s not quite ready for that yet.

He staggers towards the bathroom to piss, legs feeling like jelly, head feeling like jelly - fucking Donghyuck is so good, still, whether he is sober or drunk, it always makes him feel good afterwards - and after wetting a towel with warm water he goes back to the main bedroom.

The only thing he can see of Donghyuck is a lump under the blanket with a tuft of dark hair peeking out. He carefully walks in front of the bed, considers for a moment the hypothesis of waking Donghyuck up if he tries to clean him up, and, in that case, the possibility of Donghyuck being cranky and impossible to deal with versus soft and sleepy. It’s always a fifty-fifty chance when interrupting one of his naps. While he hesitates, his phone vibrates. Mark picks up the call without even checking the ID, thinking it’s from work. It’s not from work.

“Donghyuck, is everything okay?”

Mark blinks, confused.

“Jaemin?”

He checks the phone quickly and realizes it’s not his phone, but Donghyuck’s - the last model of iPhone, the same Mark received from his firm for work-related calls - and then Jaemin’s voice comes out from the speaker again.

“Mark? What the hell are you doing with Donghyuck’s phone?”

Mark sends a worried look to the Donghyuck-shaped lump, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of him waking up. He quickly leaves the room, closing the door at his back. He leans against it. He has no idea what to say but he knows this isn’t going to be a pleasant conversation.

“Are you still there? What the fuck, Mark? Where is Donghyuck?”

“Sleeping,” comes the curt reply.

“Where are you?”

There’s an edge of hysteria in Jaemin’s voice.

“My house. Well, Donghyuck’s house now, I guess.”

“Why would you be there? Why is he sleeping? Mark, Mark what the fuck did you do this time?”

“I’m gonna hang up on you if you keep screaming on the phone. It’s not your business why I’m here and I’m not in any way obligated to tell you, but I will if you just calm down.”

There’s a moment of silence, followed by nervous rustling. Distantly, Mark hears the sounds of traffic.

“Also please tell me you’re not having a panic attack while driving. At least pull over if you’re going to pass out from screaming at me.”

Jaemin grunts something bitter, but a few moments later Mark hears the sound of the turn signals clicking and the murmur of the car as it stops. He can even hear Jaemin taking away his seatbelt. Then silence, for a moment.

“I came here to get the divorce papers,” he explains.

“Why didn’t you just go to Johnny? There was no reason for you to go there in person.”

“Donghyuck refused to hand them over. He wanted us to go to court. Johnny sent me here to get them myself.”

There’s a soft curse coming from the other side.

“Then what happened? Did you fuck Donghyuck? I can’t even believe you now, Mark.”

“That’s definitely not your business-”

“Donghyuck was supposed to upload a video today, but he didn’t. He also had a livestream scheduled for fifteen minutes ago, but didn’t show up. And he cut the last one short because someone showed up and called him darling in Korean. Do you have any idea how much people are talking right now?”

Mark is tempted to hurt Jaemin, for a moment. Tell him that, yes, they were fucking. Suck it up, Jaem, fucking suck it up again. If he doesn’t, it’s only because he doesn’t know whether Donghyuck wants other people to know about their arrangement.

“That’s not any of my problems,” he answers in the end. “And, again, this is _not_ your business, I’m only telling you because you’re my friend and you’re Donghyuck’s friend and I know you’re worried, but I don’t like your tone, I don’t like it at all. Donghyuck wasn’t feeling well, that’s why he’s sleeping. We kinda screamed at each other for a while, so I don’t blame him. I don’t know shit about his Youtube job and he can tell his subscribers whatever he wants when he wakes up, I just came back here to get my papers signed.”

“You’re such a bad liar for being a lawyer… You definitely fucked, but I can’t understand if you’re not telling me because you’re ashamed or because you think Donghyuck wouldn’t want me to know.”

“What are you, his boyfriend? If you are, you should ask him. If you aren’t, fuck off.”

 _Are you happy?_ Mark wants to ask. Because Jaemin has always wanted to be Donghyuck’s boyfriend, and it’s so fucking clear he’s not, it’s so fucking clear he can’t get over the fact that he’s not, and this must hurt. _Are you happy that you forced my hand to the point that I hurt you?_

He expects Jaemin to lash back. He doesn’t expect Jaemin to actually hurt him back.

“You used to be nice, Mark, but even when you were nice your mouth was always full of shit, back then just like now. Don’t talk about things you know absolutely nothing about. You disappeared from his life without a single word of explanation, you made him think he was worthless, you made him think you were ashamed of him. You ruined him.”

The thing is, Mark is sure nothing can hurt him aside from Donghyuck, he just didn’t expect Jaemin to stoop so low as to use Donghyuck to hurt him.

“ _You_ don’t talk about things you know nothing about. Keep Donghyuck out of your mouth, Jaemin. It’s a warning.”

“I know nothing about it, you say? Who do you think was there to pick up the pieces when you left? It was Renjun, it was Jeno, sure, but it was mostly me. I tried making Donghyuck happy, Mark. Since you like to talk about how I always wanted to be his boyfriend, well, I was. I dated Donghyuck, and I wasn’t able to make him happy because you hurt him so deeply no one could help him but you. And you didn’t. So _you_ keep Donghyuck out of your mouth, Mark, or I swear to God I’ll-”

The door opens behind Mark, depriving him of his only support. He falls back and Donghyuck catches him at the last moment. He looks cranky. Then he hears Jaemin’s swearing, unmistakable even if he’s not on speaker since he’s close to screaming. Then he sees the phone.

“Is that my phone?” he asks.

Mark sends him a panicked look. “I thought it was mine and I answered.”

“Get inside and don’t eavesdrop or I’ll cut your ears.” Mark leaves the phone to him and escapes inside the bedroom. “And find something to wear, the whole neighborhood can see you flaunt your ass around!”

He does find something to wear. He does not eavesdrop. When Donghyuck comes back he finds Mark sitting on the bed, on clean sheets - the dirty ones that still smell of sex have been thrown in the laundry basket hidden between the closet and the wall - and completely dressed.

Donghyuck sends him a puzzled look. Mark tries not to stare at his bare chest and salivate and fails spectacularly.

“You snooped around for sheets?” Donghyuck asks, as he opens a drawer to pick up a t-shirt.

“Thought you might like that.”

“Now you care about what I might like? Don’t answer that, whatever you say it’s just going to make me angry. Well, angrier.”

Mark doesn’t answer. He quite agrees with Donghyuck, there’s not an answer that wouldn’t make him angry. So, instead of answering, he asks.

“Jaemin said you dated.”

Donghyuck’s eyes narrow.

“We did. For a while. He has always liked me, and in other circumstances, we could’ve been really good together.”

“What didn’t work?”

“Jaemin is good at taking care of people, you know, that’s why he went to nursing school. He makes it easy, you just have to trust him and he’ll keep you safe. But I didn’t want to be taken care of, Mark, and the whole focus of our relationship was trying to make me feel better after you dumped me. I never had a chance to fall for him, I just had no choice but to rely on him.”

Oh, and from the way his expression grows distant, this Donghyuck looks like he doesn’t really like relying on people.

“Still, he always told me it was a good thing we broke up so early, before we fell even deeper for each other. He said it would make it easier to get over you. You know who else said the same thing?”

Mark has to bite his tongue from answering.

“Yes, you. You talked to Jaemin before you broke up with me, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“You talked to Jaemin, you talked to Johnny, you talked to Jeno, am I missing anyone?”

“I talked to my mom.”

“You talked to everyone but me. And they all told you the same thing, but I would’ve told you something different Mark.”

That’s the most tragic thing, even after all these years.

“I know, that’s why I didn’t talk about it with you.”

💕

Like most big things that happened during Mark’s teenage years, Mark meets Jaemin through Donghyuck.

It’s not the only way it could have ever happened - Jaemin shares a few classes with Jeno and he’s friends with Renjun, plus his mother quickly gets to know Mark’s mother, so they would have met at some point, but it happens through Donghyuck, of course, and the Korean Culture Club.

Mark - whose Korean name is Minhyung, a name that no one, not even his mother, not even Donghyuck, ever used to call him - was born and raised in the States. He went to Korea a couple of times when he was a kid and once as an adult after graduating university, a solo trip of self discovery, his last hiccup of rebellion against the system. He doesn’t speak Korean very well, and he only learned the language in primary school just so that he could communicate with a tiny Lee Donghyuck who still spoke more Korean than English when he moved to California with his mom, but that was the extent of his Koreanness. He never really understood the yearning - for this lost country, this lost home that is still there but can never be home again - that his brother felt, that Donghyuck felt, that the other couple of Korean-American kids at school felt. Korea is and has always been a concept, more familiar to him than to any generic other American kid, but still a foreign concept. That’s why he never joined the Korean Culture Club at school, not even when Donghyuck started spending more time there than at Mark’s house.

Jeno is the same, born in Boston, moved to California because his father wanted to live close to his younger brother. He speaks very little Korean and gets a headache whenever he has to read in _hangeul_ , but he still loves his mom’s _kimchi jjigae_ as much as Mac and Cheese - something that Donghyuck will always judge him for - and when he’s ten he decides he wants to go by John in school because everyone calls him Jeeno. (People will always call him Jeeno, but at some point, he learns to smile like he doesn’t care.)

Jaemin, though, Jaemin arrives from Korea when Mark is, like, thirteen or fourteen, in his second year of middle school. Mark knows because Donghyuck tells him that there’s a kid in the Korean Culture Club who speaks more Korean than English, and he’s fucking excited because he’ll be able to practice his Korean with a native speaker for once. Mark scolds him, “Don’t say _fucking_ ,” and promptly forgets about the new kid from Korea. That’s it, until Donghyuck asks him if he can tutor Jaemin in English.

“Your grades are better,” he says as a justification, batting his eyelashes at Mark. “And your English is also better.”

“Well, your Korean is better,” answers Mark, feeling more annoyed than he should. “If he only speaks Korean I won’t understand a thing.”

“You shouldn’t underestimate yourself, Mark, your Korean is good. I taught you all of it, after all.”

Mark pouts. That’s a lie, he wants to say, mom taught me more than you did, but Donghyuck is beaming - and also waiting for an answer.

“Fine, fine. You can invite him the next time you come with homework. We can play games and chat, there’s no better way to learn.”

“Will you look at his homework too?” Donghyuck asks, batting his eyelashes in a gross, coy way.

“Will I get paid for this?”

“I’ll let you choose Jin next time we play Tekken.”

“You said it.”

It will actually never happen, Donghyuck letting Mark use Jin, and they both know it’s kind of an empty promise, but anyway, three days later Jaemin carefully steps into Mark’s living room, bowing gracefully and greeting Mark’s mom in perfect Korean, making her squeal excitedly.

Six months later Jaemin speaks English better than Mark, though he will probably never lose the Korean accent. Other than learning English, in six months he has charmed his way into Mark’s family, Mark’s group of friends and probably Mark’s heart too. It’s just easy to like him. He’s funny and trustworthy, always smiling, always calm. He doesn’t study hard but he does well in everything, and even the slight jealousy Mark feels at the thought of someone else spending so much time with Donghyuck other than him is overwhelmed by the fact that Jaemin has become one of his best friends.

Five years later, Mark meets Jaemin at the basketball field behind the presbyterian church. Jeno is playing with Lucas, one of the Chinese exchange students Lucas’ family is always hosting, and the tiniest of Renjun’s proteges from choir, a kid who loves Stephen Curry way too much and has a mad aim. Mark had been playing with them, but he steps aside when Jaemin arrives and sits down on the bench on the sidelines.

“Donghyuck is not speaking to me,” he says, as a greeting, flopping down next to him.

Jaemin hums. “Renjun told me you fought.”

The sun has been setting slowly, casting a peachy glow over the walls of the church, like a stage for grotesque shadow monsters casted by the baskets and the players. Mark dries the sweat from his brow with the edge of his tank and sighs.

“We kinda did, but I didn’t think it was enough for him to just… shut me out? Mom told me his family left the town to go to the funeral of a relative in Arizona and he didn’t even think of telling me?”

Jaemin grimaces. “Ah, fuck. His phone broke. He was with us when it happened, but you know Donghyuck. It’s probably still in repair... if they were even able to afford it.”

“Still, he could’ve messaged from Taeyong’s phone?”

Jaemin shrugs. On the wall, shadow-Jaemin’s shrug looks so much more theatrical and dramatic. Shadow-Mark just looks slumped. Tired.

“You’re supposed to help me, Jaem.”

“I don’t know if Donghyuck is avoiding you, man. I don’t even know what you fought about.” He furrows his eyebrows and makes that face, like when he wants to say something but doesn’t actually want to say it.

“Come on,” Mark says, “spit it out.”

“I don’t think it was a great idea, for you and Donghyuck to start dating right before you leave for the other side of the world.”

“It’s the same country!”

“It’s a day away! You just… you didn’t really think this through, Mark. You fought and you haven’t talked to each other in a couple of days, but he’s going to come back from Arizona tomorrow and you’ll be able to talk. But what about when you’re going to be at Yale and he’s going to be here and you won’t be able to see him in person? Are you sure you’re ready to have a long-distance relationship?”

It’s impossible to answer. Mark never had a long-distance relationship before. He never really had any relationship before.

“It’s just…” Jaemin sighs, frustrated. “You’re going to leave, Mark. And even if you can have a long-distance relationship, you’re both going to be trapped in it. We’re kids, there’s so many experiences we still have to do, but you won’t get to do them because you’re tied to each other, and you can’t do them with each other because you’ll live a whole country apart. Is it fair to you, is it fair to Donghyuck?”

How much of this Jaemin is Mark’s friend, how much is Donghyuck’s friend, and how much of him is the guy who’s been quietly in love with Donghyuck since freshman year of middle school? Mark has no idea, but Jaemin makes sense. That was always the problem with him. Even when Mark doesn’t want him to, he makes sense.

💕

Mark decides to head downstairs while Donghyuck goes live a few minutes to tell his followers he’s not feeling well and that he’ll resume his usual posting schedule tomorrow.

Donghyuck’s pantry is almost empty, but Mark still finds some rice leftovers in the rice cooker and kimchi in the smaller refrigerator under the cupboard. Donghyuck never told him he could eat anything, but when they were teenagers and everything was easier, every day after Mark’s mom drove them home, Donghyuck never came back to his own house. He followed Mark inside, instead, and while Mark walked up to drop their bags in his room, Donghyuck waltzed in the kitchen and scooped the leftover rice and side dishes Mark’s mom had left for them, made two bowls of food and set the table for Mark and himself. It was an unspoken rule that Donghyuck would just eat with them. His mother either worked too early to make breakfast or too late to make dinner. Taeyong cooked, sometimes, but he worked too. Donghyuck ate at Mark’s table most of the time. They made it work like that, and no one ever, _ever_ told him to stop, just to take more.

Now, years later, Mark sits in the renovated kitchen of his now former house, opening the cupboards to look for tableware, and realizes his mom left Donghyuck her favorite ceramic bowls, the ones with the peach tree flowers, the pink strokes still vivid over the grey background .

Donghyuck’s family doesn’t live across the street. Mark and Donghyuck haven’t spoken to each other in years. They didn’t make it work, at all. And yet Mark takes another bowl with peach flowers and fills it with food, setting it on the other side of the table, the spot that had always been reserved for Donghyuck.

Then, he waits.

“It’s kinda late for dinner,” Donghyuck says, when he comes back, but he still sits at his usual spot in front of Mark. He’s holding a file folder and he carefully lays it on the table, right between his seat and Mark’s.

“Well, it’s never too late if you skipped it,” Mark says. He ignores the folder and takes a spoonful of rice, trying not to show how nervous he is under Donghyuck’s stare. “What? Are you not going to eat that?”

Donghyuck takes the spoon, puts it down. Pushes the folder towards Mark.

“It’s our wedding certificate.”

Mark picks up a piece of kimchi with his chopsticks and brings it to his mouth. It’s real, handmade kimchi, something he hasn’t tasted in months. He chews on it, enjoying the tangy spiciness at the back of his throat before swallowing. He balances his chopsticks on the edges of the bowl before he finally picks up the folder and opens it. He reads the first page, immediately frowns. He checks the signatures at the end, definitely his own and Donghyuck’s, then puts it down with a sigh. He rubs his forehead, right in the middle of his eyes. The cover of the folder has Donghyuck’s favorite SHINee member on it. Somehow, it makes everything feel more trivial. Millionaire Youtuber Peter Lee still clings on to the Taemin clear file holder Mark got for him at a kpop shop in Sacramento during a family trip.

He hazards a look ar Donghyuck, who’s looking at him like he’s afraid Mark will explode, teeth clamping down on his bottom lip. What a terrible boy he is. He has every reason and no right to fear Mark’s reaction now.

“Since when have you had this?” Mark asks, waving the marriage certificate in front of Donghyuck’s face.

“Since the first day. After calling Johnny I went back to the bar where we met, the chapel was just a few streets away. I asked for a copy, they told me we never even took the original with us. We left it on the counter when we rode the taxi to your hotel.”

Mark rubs the spot between his eyes again.

“You had this on you when you came to my flat?”

“It was in my messenger bag. I went there to give it to you.”

“And then what happened?”

Donghyuck smiles. It’s wry.

“I thought it wasn’t fair. I thought you were an asshole and you didn’t deserve the easy way. Not this time.”

“The easy way?” His lips click together as he weighs his words carefully. “You think leaving you was the easy thing? It was the right thing, it was the _mature_ thing, but it wasn’t easy!”

Donghyuck laughs at him, and there, there it is, all the fear of Mark’s reaction. Maybe this is Mark’s best talent, turning Donghyuck in the most lethal version of himself, making him fearless.

“Maybe leaving wasn’t easy, but not coming back? Don’t tell me that it wasn’t the easy way.” He leans over the table, staring right at Mark, the corners of his mouth turned upwards yet cold. “You made your choice, Mark, and that’s valid, even if it took me years to come to terms with the fact that you decided I just wasn’t enough for you.”

“That wasn’t-” Mark tries to say, but Donghyuck grabs the collar of his shirt and shakes it.

“But don’t you try telling me you weren’t being a fucking coward when you refused to come back, stringing together excuse after excuse. A real man would’ve stood by his choice and explained it, a real man would’ve had the guts to face me again. Don’t talk to me about maturity, you were a fucking child. You still are.”

“Is that why you blackmailed me into coming here? Because of something I did eight years ago?”

“Because you would’ve done it again! You were just going to walk back, let Johnny handle this thing, and disappear. And you don’t deserve that. _I_ don’t deserve that. I’m not something you can walk by, I’m not something you can just leave behind, Mark. I’m not _easy._ “

Oh, nothing about Donghyuck has ever been easy, that’s why Mark avoided him up until now.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything? How does it feel to be forced to face your own fucking behavior?”

Awful, it feels awful. The worst thing is that Donghyuck is right, completely right. Leaving was not easy, but not coming back? That was easy. Easier. And Mark would have never come back if Donghyuck hadn’t tricked him into it. He doesn’t know if it’s a good thing or not, he doesn’t know if he regrets it. Something shifted, but he doesn’t know what. He can only hear the white noise.

“You... you tricked me into having sex with you.”

“Fuck you, I begged you to have sex with me, Mark. And it didn’t even take much to convince you. You don’t get to hold this over me.”

Mark raises his hand in surrender, because this, at last, seems to push Donghyuck on the verge of tears. And no, he doesn’t get to hold this over Donghyuck.

“Okay, okay I apologize. I wanted it too. I... I take that back. I’m just angry. Can I be angry?”

“Oh, you can. I’ve been angry for eight fucking years.”

That’s... legitimate. Extreme, but legitimate.

Mark looks at the marriage certificate. Mark Lee and Donghyuck Lee.

“We weren’t ever really married, weren’t we?”

Donghyuck shrugs.

“You’re the lawyer. You tell me.”

He signed it Donghyuck. Donghyuck Lee. Except the name on his green card is not Donghyuck, it’s Peter. Peter Lee. And no one in their Asian-American circle has ever called him Peter, but it’s still the name on his green card, on his school records, the name that should go in any kind of public document. This certificate is so not fucking valid.

💕

The night Donghyuck comes back from Arizona, Mark tells his mom he’s taking the car and leaves before she can ask him anything - where are you going, who are you going with, what are you going to do, Mark doesn’t know any of that. He just knows he needs to get away, even if just for a moment.

In his room, all his belongings have been carefully packed. The flight company called and told him that his flight had canceled and that he could reschedule it. He chose an earlier date, in order to have more days to deal with all the initial paperwork and get settled into the dormitory before orientation starts. It’s almost one week earlier than his supposed departure date.

Everything is already settled, and Johnny will even pick him up at the airport to show him around.

 _Isn’t Donghyuck coming with you?_ Johnny had asked, when Mark had messaged him to ask for this tiny little favor.

Mark had felt very bad as he answered.

_Nope, I’m all on my own._

Donghyuck doesn’t even know he’s leaving early. They haven’t talked in days. Broken phone or not, he hasn’t called. Maybe Jaemin is right. How can expect this to work all the way across the States if they can’t even make it work from across the street?

Mark feels a pang of guilt when he remembers he could’ve also called Taeyong and asked him to pass him Donghyuck, and he didn’t. He tells himself he just didn’t want to fight with Donghyuck on the phone during a funeral. He wasn’t scared of Donghyuck refusing to speak to him at all.

Mark turns the key into the ignition, pushes down on the gas pedal and leaves his house behind, drives all the way to the taco place behind the movie theater, the one with a neon pink sign outside that always starts flickering after midnight. It’s Mark’s and Donghyuck’s favorite.

He gets a last-minute order just before the kitchen closes down and a tired glare from the waitress. At least it’s Lena and not Mrs. Davis on shift tonight. Mrs. Davis would’ve just sent Mark back home empty-handed.

“Only because it’s you, “ Lena says, instead, “and you’re taking it out because I need to clean up.”

Then she looks behind him. “Where’s Peter?”

Mark swallows a knot of bitter chagrin. He hadn’t realized he had ordered for two, he just asked for the usual. He’s never come here on his own, as far as he can remember.

“At home,” he lies, easily. “Too lazy to get up from the couch.”

She nods and pops a bubblegum in front of him. It’s a little unprofessional, but it’s after closing hours after all, and Mark wouldn’t even care if it was during working hours.

“I’m gonna leave for university tomorrow, so this is probably my last order for a while.”

“Oh, where did you get accepted?” she asks. Small talk. Small talk is easy.

“Yale.”

She whistles.

“Well, congratulations. It’ll feel strange though, not seeing you or Peter anymore. You’re here every two days, really.”

“He’s not coming to Yale,” Mark says, maybe too quickly, and she sends him a quizzical look. “Not like that, I mean. He’s actually younger than me, so he’s gonna stay here for... another year, at least.”

She turns around to retrieve Mark’s order from the kitchen and hands it to him. He gives her the money, pre-counted, down to the last cent.

“That sucks. You’re gonna miss him a lot, since you’re always together.”

Mark swallows and he realizes he’s on the verge of crying in the middle of Polly’s Taquería because the one Lena is handing him is the last taco he will eat before leaving for Connecticut, and it’s also the first he will ever eat without Donghyuck.

 _I already miss him,_ he thinks. _I fucking miss him,_ and how fucking worse it’s going to be when he’s going to be there, alone, and Donghyuck is going to be here, in this fucking cursed town, this snow globe town - except it’s not snow falling down, it’s dust, pink glitter, the highlighter on Donghyuck’s cheeks when Mark kissed him the night of prom. Will the spell break once Mark leaves? Or is Mark just going to age, alone, away from here, away from Donghyuck, while everything in Heatherfield stays the same? How can it stay the same when Mark’s has tasted Donghyuck’s strawberry lip balm, kissed it out of his lips and into his own, and he will never be able to do it anymore?

“So, good luck Mark. See you for Thanksgiving I guess.”

He nods and leaves Polly’s before he starts crying for real.

He takes the car to the parking lot behind the church and walks towards the basketball field.

No one’s there, other than the moths dancing around the shaky lamplights. He eats his taco alone, sitting on the bench at the courtside. The air smells like the middle of summer vacation, even though Mark’s summer vacation is already over.

His flight is in twelve hours. He still hasn’t told Donghyuck.

Mark throws out the other taco before he walks back to the car. It wasn’t that big, but he feels too full to even take a bite of that, even though he paid for it. As he dumps it in the closest garbage bin, he realizes it’s almost cathartic. Like a toast to a life of things he won’t get to share with Donghyuck. To a life of things he has but cannot take with him. To a life of things he will have to leave behind.

The lights in Donghyuck’s house are on when he comes back. All except for Donghyuck’s room. The lights in Mark’s house are all turned off, though. It’s past midnight, his parents probably went to sleep already. Mark’s mom messaged him to come back early or he will oversleep and miss his flight tomorrow, but she didn’t stay up to wait for him. Small blessings.

The automatic gate of the backyard of his house takes forever to open, the red light blinking angrily at Mark from both the LED bulb installed on the left pillar of the wall and the remote control in his hands. He parks the car carefully on the driveway, making sure he’s not scraping the side against the plastic chairs his dad has piled up next to the porch.

He turns the key and the engine dies down. Big breaths, big breaths, Mark Lee, he tells himself, because this is just the first of the many hurdles he’ll have to face in his life. The first is always the worst, they say, but in this case, well, this definitely isn’t the worst just because it’s the first.

Donghyuck is sitting on the porch of Mark’s house, next to the bright pink geraniums, looking like he’s waited for Mark his whole life.

> _blood in the water or rosebud songs, they leave the same soft color to stain your mouth._

“Give me one reason. Give me just one fucking reason, Donghyuck. Why shouldn’t I just set you on fire?”

“Murder is a crime?”

“Oh, no, you don’t get to play the smartass with me. You know what? I could have you arrested.”

Donghyuck snorts. “For what? Writing the wrong name on our marriage certificate? There’s no law against that. I never blackmailed you, or threatened you, or tried to extort your money. In fact, this case wouldn’t even get to court.”

“You asked me to fuck you,” Mark says, and it feels like the wrong thing to say because it makes Donghyuck smile his most dangerous smile, the hurt one.

“I don’t think the jury would blame me. Do you think someone would blame you for saying yes?”

Oh, no one could ever blame Mark for saying yes to Donghyuck. He could blame himself, though. He makes such a good job of that.

“Why did you do this?” he asks, opening his arms and waving the papers around. “All of this?”

“I told you. I was angry. I don’t think it’s fair that you can just... appear in my life and then cut me out, just like that. You already did it once and you made it sound so easy. I wanted to make things difficult for you.”

Oh, he did it. He made things so difficult for Mark.

“You knew I was in Vegas.” He tries not to let it come out accusing, but it does come out accusing anyway.

“Yes, in fact, I did. Johnny told me. But I didn’t come looking for you. I spent the whole weekend recording for my channel and the last night my team organized a surprise party for the fifty million subscribers. It’s the video I was supposed to be editing today. I didn’t know the place and I had no idea you would be in that bar.”

Mark swallows as he carefully considers Donghyuck’s words. It makes sense. Johnny wasn’t the one who picked that specific bar, Mr. Cage was. There was no way Donghyuck could’ve known Mark was there. And it is true, at least according to what Mark remembers, that they stumbled upon each other because Mark got into the wrong room.

“That’s fair. I believe you. Then, what? You found the marriage papers, you came to my house to tell me they weren’t valid. You got angry-”

“You got me angry.”

“Whatever. Let’s assume I’m an asshole so I don’t have to repeat it all the time for your pleasure.”

“That would not be an assumption, Mark.”

“What. Ever. So I got you angry and you decided not to tell me. And I came here. And then what? Why the sex?”

“Why not? You’re really hot.”

“I thought you hated me.”

Donghyuck doesn’t answer that. He stares at Mark, so, so angrily.

“I don’t have to justify myself to you. My reasons are my own. My feelings, too, are my own. Just like your feelings are yours. You get no other explanation, Mark, no other... closure. I don’t think you deserve one. You don’t even get to be shown the door, you know where it is already. Just get out. You got what you wanted, so get out.”

Is this how Donghyuck felt, all those years ago, watching Mark leave without an explanation, and a week ago, again, when he visited Mark, was he still hoping for one? Maybe he just wanted a reason, a why or a because.

(Why did you leave if you liked me?

Because I was a coward, because I was scared, because I thought I was doing the right thing. Why, Mark would like to ask back, why would you fuck me if you hated me? Why did I say yes? Why can’t we make any sense?

The reason must be the same, after all. Donghyuck still wants Mark. Mark still wants Donghyuck. It’s too bad they fucked up - Mark fucked up.)

Mark carefully puts the marriage certificate down on the table. He lets out a shaky breath. He turns on his heels and leaves without even saying goodbye.

💕

Donghyuck finds him sitting down on the porch ten minutes later. Mark’s eyes are red. Donghyuck looks so tired.

“I didn’t hear the car leaving,” he says. “Plus, your stuff is still all in my bedroom.”

Mark shrugs and shuffles a little closer to the wall so that Donghyuck can sit down next to him. They used to fit so well when they were young, but now there’s barely enough space for them not to do that awkward knee-bumping, trying not to lean into each other out of habit because they’re still so angry, so hurt, so on the verge of something sharp and thin like the glass edges of a broken window.

“You know, part of me has been stuck in this house for the past eight years, on the day I left you. And you’re right, I probably don’t deserve closure, but you do, and something about all this mess tells me you’ve been stuck on that day as much as I was.”

Donghyuck’s lips tremble.

“So you came here to give me closure?”

“I don’t know how to give you closure, Donghyuck. I don’t know how to… undo this. It’s been eight years of running away from you.”

It’s quiet. Eleven PM, a residential district, a tiny town, a place where nothing happens. Like a fairy-tale, like everything fell asleep the moment Mark’s dad drove him to the airport and it's still waiting for him as he left it, trapped in a spell. Except maybe it was Mark, he was the one trapped into a spell, unable to change, unable to grow up, to wake up. Maybe he’s the one who’s been dreaming, a long nightmare of days that melt into each other until all the colors look the same. It’s late, but isn’t it time to wake up?

“We ended things a long time ago, but I never stopped liking you. At least you tried, you met other people, you said you dated seriously. But I just… I can’t. It’s you or nothing for me, and I ruined you so it’s nothing, isn’t it?”

Donghyuck doesn’t answer, just looks at Mark as he struggles to find the words. He waits. He waited eight years for these words, he’s not going to rush Mark into them.

“When I broke up with you,” Mark continues, after a while, “I didn’t want to hurt you, but I did want to break us up for real. I did it because I thought it would’ve been better for us. I thought we were going to keep each other from reaching our goals, I thought we would fight all the time and still cling onto this relationship because we liked each other too much. I knew you wouldn’t let it go, so I had to do it myself. But even after I left, Donghyuck, I knew that the moment I would see you again, I would want to be with you. So I couldn’t come back. You’re right, you were completely right. I haven’t come back for eight years because I was afraid of meeting you. I was afraid of realizing I still wanted you, I was afraid of seeing you and thinking it had been a mistake, and regretting everything. But this is not how I work.”

“Oh, I know how you work, Mark. Once you make a decision, you don’t look back. What’s done is done, isn’t it? No regrets.”

“Yes. And yet we met, and I wanted you. And I regretted everything. And I don’t know where to go from there.”

“So you came here.”

Because you forced me, Mark wants to answer, but that is not true. He came because it was about time. Because he’s been withholding this moment for so long that at some point he lost it, it strayed into the darkest parts of his mind, locked in a drawer stuck into the frame.

“That I did. I… I guess I’m sorry. I’m not sorry that I did what I did eight years ago. I don’t think I’d be where I am, I don’t think you’d be where you are - a fucking celebrity, I can’t even believe - if we hadn’t broken up. But I’m sorry that… I’m sorry that I made you feel worthless. I’m sorry that I never came back. I’m sorry that I never offered an explanation. I’m sorry for the past eight years. And I’m sorry that the best thing I can offer you is… just me leaving again, but I cannot stay. As long as I’m with you, I’ll want you. And I can’t live like this, constantly second-guessing my decisions. The best thing I can do for us is to stay away from you.”

“Because that worked out so well for you until now.”

Mark evades Donghyuck’s bitter gaze, and his eyes catch the goosebumps on Donghyuck’s arm where he bumps into his own. Donghyuck snaps his fingers in front of Mark’s face.

“Look at me, you owe me that.” Mark does. It hurts, it takes all his willpower, but he does. “So, staying away, isn’t that what you’ve been doing until now? Avoiding me, brooding in your self-martyrdom like an angsty teenager. You think you did shit, don’t you? You saved us both from suffering. Fuck you, Mark Lee. You’re so dumb. You had eight years to think about this and you came to the same conclusion you reached eight years ago. The wrong one.”

Mark looks down - guilty of all charges, Your Honor - and Donghyuck chops him on his nape.

“Look at me, you asshole, you have no right to look away. You’re apologizing, do it right. Do things right this time.”

“I am looking at you. It’s physically painful, if you want to know. You’re so pretty it hurts.”

Donghyuck tries to hit him again and Mark tries to duck but there’s no space and he hits various parts of his body against the door behind him.

“That hurt”, he complains.

“That’s what you deserve.”

“At least we agree on something.”

It’s too early for crickets or cicadas. It’s too late for traffic. There’s only silence.

“I don’t know what to do, Donghyuck. Even after eight years, I don’t know how to deal with you. With this.”

“We can’t go back together,” Donghyuck says, and Mark knew - he never even dreamed of getting _that_ back, but it still hurts. “Eight years is a long time, I have eventually forgiven you for breaking up with me a long time ago, but I haven’t forgiven you for disappearing like that. You were my best friend and you just fucking left like I didn’t matter.”

“So what do you want me to do to make up for it? Be your friend again? I don’t think I can, Hyuck, I don’t think I can go back to that.”

“Well, then find a way. Stop being a coward. Stop thinking only about your feelings. If you want to be forgiven you have to earn that. And you won’t earn it by fucking me, no matter how good you are at it - and you’re very good, I have to admit.”

“Thanks. You’re not bad yourself.”

“Stop being smug and start groveling. You will need a lot of groveling to get back into my good graces again. I had a lot of time to build up my anger.”

He swallows. Mark’s eyes catch on the movement, his throat and Adam’s apple moving at once. His eyelashes flutter.

“If you’re not serious about this,”he starts, and he has to stop to swallow again, like he’s struggling to talk, “if you’re just going to change your mind and disappear again because you’re too proud or too much of a coward to own up to your poor behavior, then… I’ll eventually get over it. I can’t help it if you’re an asshole. And I don’t need an asshole in my life. But if you’re serious, if there’s anything of my best friend left in you, I’d like to get him back. I missed him a lot.”

How painful must it be for Donghyuck to say this? Mark closes his eyes. Who knows what will happen by the time he reopens them? Time to break the spell.

“Oh,” he answers, feeling wetness catch on his eyelashes, “I think he missed you too.”

💕

It’s past midnight when Mark looks at his watch and then rubs his temples with a groan.

“Even if I leave now and drive back to Sacramento, there’s not going to be any more flights before tomorrow morning.”

Donghyuck looks at him with one of his, _and how is that one of my problems?_ looks, but Mark is feeling brave and stupid and reckless tonight.

“Would you mind letting me crash here tonight?”

“Ha,” Donghyuck scoffs. “Ha, The nerve, Mark Lee. I’m sorry, I do mind.”

“Not even if we fuck again?”

Donghyuck’s eyes narrow. Oh, he’s considering it. It doesn’t last long, though. He flashes Mark one of his mean looks.

“You wish you could fuck me again. But you can stay. You’re sleeping on the couch. Without a pillow.”

“That’s mean. Do I get a blanket? It’s kinda cold.”

“You get a blanket. I think you earned a blanket.”

Better than nothing. Mark actually has booked a hotel room, but there’s no way he’s telling Donghyuck. He follows him back inside like a puppy. In his haste to leave he had forgotten his suitcase was still in Donghyuck’s room so he goes up to get that first. As he walks through the corridor, his eyes catch the closed door of his once room.

“What about my room?” he asks. “Can’t I stay there?”

“There’s more dust than memories in there at this point, but you’re welcome to nest in it if you want. Your mom left it as it was. She said you would come back at some point.”

Mark snorts. She really knows him better than he knows himself.

“Do you think she ever realized we were dating?” he asks. That makes Donghyuck snort back at him.

“Do you think she wouldn’t? That woman raised the both of us. Give her some credit.”

Donghyuck gives him a pillow, in the end. And a fluffy blanket. Mark tried to give him puppy eyes but he’s still not allowed back in the bedroom. He does his best to curl up against the couch, wraps himself in the blanket and fishes at least three videogame controllers from the crevices between the pillows. Donghyuck watches him fuss and turn and toss for a moment, standing at the door like he’s stranded.

“What is it?” Mark asks. “Are you having second thoughts? Because I really like sleeping in a bed.”

“Ha. You’re not touching my bed again. Knowing you we’d end up having sex and then we’d have to change the sheets and then it would be tomorrow morning and I won’t have slept a minute because of you. I have work to do this weekend. No is a no.”

“Then why are you staring at me like I’m going to disappear.”

“I don’t know. Are you going to disappear, Mark Lee? Last time you did.”

Mark grimaces.

“Ah, Hyuck. You should’ve become the lawyer, not me. You would’ve been really terrible in a courtroom. The nightmare of every prosecutor. Unless you became the prosecutor, then you would be my nightmare only.”

“Am I not already your nightmare? Also that’s a terrible idea. I would’ve been a lot poorer. And stressed. You can keep your job, I’ll keep mine.”

Yet, he doesn’t leave the door. He keeps staring at Mark.

“You want a promise?” Mark asks. “That tomorrow I will still be here?”

“Would you keep it? I don’t really trust your word anymore. I was just looking, in case you’re not here when I wake up. It would be a nice memory.”

Mark blinks, then starts patting the back pockets of his jeans until he fishes up his phone.

“Turn the lights on,” he asks, as he fiddles with the apps. Donghyuck sends him a puzzled look but eventually complies. Mark raises the phone. The light is terrible, the filters only marginally help. His eyes are so swollen from the crying and Donghyuck looks like he went through a calamity and survived out of sheer will.

(Maybe that’s how it went. Mark always thought Donghyuck would be the calamity, but maybe he’s always been Donghyuck’s calamity and he never realized.”

“Smile,” he tries to say. He doesn’t smile, Donghyuck doesn’t either. Yet, somehow, despite the terrible lighting and the cheesy filter and their slightly bewildered expression - almost like neither of them is believing this is really happening - the photo comes out good.

Mark checks it, then gives the phone to Donghyuck.

“Here’s your memory. Our first photo together in eight years. Let’s take another one tomorrow.”

Donghyuck just stares at the screen, the pink hearts above their heads clearly not matching their not-smitten expressions. Mark almost laughs at his perplexity.

“Go to sleep, Donghyuck. It’s late.”

The words taste like dejavu in his mouth. A long time ago, he would’ve said them with Donghyuck in his arms. Now he can only fluff his pillow and watch Donghyuck prompt himself up against the doorframe like he doesn’t really know what to do with his body, like he also just caught up with this and doesn’t know what to do. Mark doesn’t know either.

“Goodnight Mark.”

“Mh, goodnight.”

💕

Mark doesn’t sleep the night before he leaves Heatherfield for Yale. He just sits on the porch, enjoys the faint breeze animating the still quietness of that end-of-July night. The sky is clear, bright with stars. In nights like these you can see the Summer Triangle like someone hung it for you, like the sticker Donghyuck pasted on the walls of Mark’s room, glow-in-the-dark, disappear-during-the-day. Mark watched the real stars pale, too. He watches the sky turn a pale pink, dawn with pink fingers just like Homer sang in the Iliad.  
“What are you doing here?” his mom asks, when she finds him watching the sun rise, red against pink, turning orange at the edges.

“Donghyuck came by,” Mark lies - except it’s not really a lie, Donghyuck did come by. “We said goodbye.”

“So he’s not coming to see you off,” his mom concludes.

Mark shakes his head. He tries to keep his voice level. “That would be awkward, wouldn’t it? I don’t wanna watch him cry at the airport.”

His mom doesn’t look convinced, but she doesn’t argue.

“Get inside. You have to take a shower before you leave. Quick, or you’ll be late!”

The suitcases are ready. The clothes Mark will wear are already on his bed. His mom ironed them carefully. His father is already waiting for him downstairs. There’s a packed lunch on the table. It would be such a normal, domestic scene if it wasn’t for the time. It’s so early there’s still a hint of pink in the sky from dawn.

Mark’s mom cries a little at the door.

“Mom, come on. I’ll be here for Thanksgiving. And I’ll call you after checking in at the airport. And after I land. And after I get to the dorms. I’ll call you every day.”

It’s not a lie, it will become one. But for now Mark is saying the truth. His mother doesn’t suspect that the next time she will see him will be when she goes to Connecticut herself, in the spring of next year. He will promise her he will come back for summer and that is going to be a lie, but now Mark thinks he’s saying the truth, so it’s the truth.

“I’m so proud of you,” his mom says.

“I’ll miss you, mom.”

It’s cheesy, too cheesy for him, but it makes her smile wetly. Mark gets in the car, fastens his seatbelts. On the other side of the road, he can see the window of Donghyuck’s room. His blinds are drawn, the lights off. Did he cry himself to sleep? He didn’t cry in front of Mark, but it was a poor act.

It feels like betrayal, more than anything else, Mark leaving at the crack of dawn. It feels like betrayal because, for every time Donghyuck left, he came to say goodbye to Mark.

“Are you ready? Did you do everything?” Mark’s dad asks. He turns the key in the ignition. Mark prays Donghyuck doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t want to be caught doing this.

His dad catches him looking at Donghyuck’s house.

“Do you want to go say goodbye?”

Mark hesitates. Even if Donghyuck is angry, he’d still want to say goodbye. He takes a look at the clock.

“No, we’re gonna be late. And Donghyuck came by yesterday night. We already said goodbye.”

“So are we ready to go?”

“Yes, I’m ready.”

“Then let’s go.”

Mark leaves without saying goodbye. Donghyuck would’ve come, probably, but Mark never told him he was actually leaving at all.

💕

Polly’s closed a long time ago and there’s no other place that makes decent tacos. Plus, Mark doesn’t know what Donghyuck likes. He stops at a 24/7 diner and buys breakfast, bacon and eggs and coffee.

 _What coffee does Donghyuck like?_ He texts Renjun.

Renjun, who’s probably only awake because he never went to sleep, answers immediately.

_Something sweet. I don’t wanna know why you’re asking._

Mark gets a caramel macchiato for Donghyuck, espresso for himself. When his car stops in front of his house - Donghyuck’s house - he sees Donghyuck come out for a moment, still in his pajama bottoms, and look at him sleepily and with a hint of panic.

“I thought you had left,” he says. Mark shows him the takeout bags. He sees him break down a little, in relief, disbelief, then a dash of pain, just a little, so brief.

“I couldn’t leave without getting you breakfast,” Mark says, fighting against the knot in his throat. “I owed you a last Polly’s but it closed.”

“It didn’t close,” Donghyuck says, without looking at him. “It relocated. They built a mall next to the old train station. It’s a tourist place now, with a museum and everything. Polly’s moved there, but they also changed management and Jaemin told me their tacos suck now.”

“Did you ever go back without me?”

Donghyuck shakes his head.

“I did,” Mark says. “The night we broke up. Before we broke up. I went there and ordered two tacos out of habit. I couldn’t eat the second one. I had already decided to end things with you, but that was the moment it hit me. It was pretty awful.”

“Imagine how it was for me. Then the next morning you were gone.”

Donghyuck takes off the lid and drinks straight from the cup, ignoring the straw.

“Yeah, I brought breakfast this time. So it’s a sweet goodbye.”

Donghyuck laughs at that, almost choking on his coffee.

Mark follows him inside. He woke up so early it was still dark, but the sky is lighting up, pink spreading against the darkness like paint in the water. The whole town is swimming in it.

“What are we now?” Mark asks, as he stabs a sausage with his fork and offers it to Donghyuck, who avoids Mark’s gaze and eyes the sausage with critical eyes.

Dawn bounces on the walls, the refrigerator buzzs quietly.

“I don’t know.” He leans forward and snatches the sausage from the top of Mark’s fork with his mouth. Mark watches him chew slowly, trying not to hyperfixate on the small smidge of grease on his upper lip.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Donghyuck continues, after he swallows. “There’s nothing left to save, I guess. So everything from now on is up to us.”

“What do you want us to be?”

Oh, and Donghyuck tilts his head to the side. His hair is so messy, but then a hint of a smile appears at the corner of his mouth and he looks like the prettiest thing Mark has ever seen.

“Happy.”

💕

Like eight years ago, dawn has faded by the way Mark makes his way back to Sacramento.

Back then, the sky had been clear. Today, it rains.

It paints the whole town grey, a goodbye more fitting to eight years ago than today. Yet, unlike eight years ago, Mark feels light, like he could actually drive into the clouds and find himself flying. He can barely feel the weight of the ring. He brought it to give it back to Donghyuck and he never took it out from his pocket. It wasn’t the right moment, it wasn’t the right thing to do. One day, maybe.

Donghyuck sends him a single bear sticker telling him to drive safely. Mark sees it at the red light. The prom flyer is still there. It’s a terrible theme, but Mark hopes it will make someone happy. His prom was pretty terrible, too, but it made him happy.

 _call your mom,_ Donghyuck messages him, _or i will. do things properly. miss you already. ttyl._

It’s awkward in a way it never was before. It’s hopeful in a way Mark never dared to dream. Before the light turns green, Donghyuck also sends him a heart. It’s pink.

> _maybe you understand best how i’m slipping love letters through the slats of the garden fence and asking the wind to carry them home, dandelion-pale wishes that only come true if i speak them aloud. even silent, i know you’ll find this one._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so uhm i might have lied when i said this was the last chapter. the epilogue is actually the last chapter.  
> the ending of this chapter wasn't originally in my plans. i know everyone wanted them to be back together, and i wanted that too, but i don't think it would've been that easy to forgive and forget and i didn't want this forgiveness to be shallow or not well-earned.  
> i hope you still liked this chapter and will tune in next week for the (truly) final chapter, yellow 💛.  
> lots of love.


	5. Yellow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the last one. I'm very sorry if I was late. This fic made me struggle a lot but I'm still very grateful for the chance of writing it.  
> I wanted to write this epilogue not as an ending, because I think the fic ended with the fourth chapter, but as a series of vignettes to give you an idea of what happened to them very briefly. If I had to say everything that happened in the next four years I'd never finish writing, so I only wrote snippets, but I'm quite happy with how they turned out. I hope you can like it too! I'll work hard and answer all the comments in the next few days, but I really wanted to publish so I can start working seriously on a new project.  
> Thank you so much for the love and attention you gave to this fic.  
> Hope you enjoy <3

**E P I L O G U E**

> _heaven wasn’t supposed to look like this. still, you’re finding a way forward, mourning tucked golden under your tongue to pay the crossing-toll._

**Fall 2020**

Mark wakes up to golden swords piercing the ceiling and his dreams, turning his eyelashes into the sparkly ends of firecrackers, popping at the edge of his eye field - when he blinks the embers burn through his closed eyelids. Sunlight shines through the draws in sharp blades, and the chirping of the birds accompany the monotonous vibration coming from his phone. Mark doesn’t feel it, he hears it only, but his whole body associates the sound with a panicked feeling of urgency and he finds himself waking up, head heavy and acid burning at the back of his throat. The lukewarm autumn sunlight washes over him, unapologetically, uncaring of his headache, uncaring of his blind and half-asleep attempt to find his phone.

He presses the green answer button unconsciously, automatically, and a cold voice immediately scolds him.

“Where the fuck is he?”

Mark blinks, and the pattern of light on the wall blinks back at him against his closed eyelids, and when he breathes he inhales a whiff of artificially breezy air-freshener. The sheets smell like neutral soap and too many washings. Next to him, someone sniffles and rustles against the blankets. A sense of dread fills his lungs.

The voice on the phone is Taeyong - Tyler - Lee’s.

“Where is my fucking brother, Mark?

Right here, Mark would say if his tongue wasn’t glued to his palate, mouth too dry to form words. The boy curling sleepily at Mark’s side, right in the middle of the bed, his cheek squished against the pillow on Mark’s side instead of his own, pushing Mark almost to the edge, on the verge of falling, is Donghyuck - Peter - Lee.

“Mark? I’m getting married in two hours and if you and Donghyuck are frolicking somewhere on the day of my wedding I will ask Johnny to kill you both-”

Mark closes the phone call. A terribly useless move, he realizes, when it starts angrily buzzing in his hand again only a few moments later. This time he can both hear and feel the vibration, angry and monotonous at the same time. Donghyuck does too. He sniffles and furrows his brows, limbs uncurling as starts waking up. He’s still wearing last night’s clothes - all of them - and he smells like expensive booze and fries. When he knocked at Mark’s door he was crying with a paper bag full of fries in one hand and an empty bottle of tequila in the other.

Something swells in Mark’s mind, like a balloon of a thought getting bigger and bigger, words distorted in his mind by the helium, the rubber of the balloon rubbing raw against his skull at the rhythm of the phone’s buzzing. When it pops, it doesn’t make any sound.

The wedding.

“Donghyuck,” Mark says, panicked. He shakes him and Donghyuck growls in displeasure, squeezing his eyes shut. “Donghyuck, fuck, wake up, wake up.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“Your brother is getting married in two hours.”

That, at least, gets Donghyuck to wake up.

💛

The next time Mark sees Donghyuck he’s surrounded by golden daylilies and he looks like he just ran a marathon, face all red, crooked tie and everything. The second prettiest boy Mark has ever seen is fixing his tie.

Mark knows Felix’s face from Donghyuck’s Youtube channel and he knows he’s taken from the countless texts he exchanged with Donghyuck in the last month. He has nothing to be jealous about. He feels jealous anyway, just for the sake of it. Donghyuck’s eyes meet his own for a moment, then the grooms arrive and the guests start buzzing like a beehive at the sight of the queen.

Taeyong is wearing black and Johnny is wearing white. A peculiar choice, something about a bet that Johnny didn’t want to tell Mark about. Johnny’s best man, his Japanese roommate from his freshman year at Yale, will reveal that story during his speech later at the reception, but Mark doesn’t know yet. He watches the ceremony from the sidelines, without drawing too much attention. He was invited at the last minute and Taeyong told him not to make him regret it. He was talking about the wedding and a lot more.

Mark hopes this morning’s stunt didn’t cost him Taeyong’s approval again. (He _did_ pull Donghyuck up and got him dressed in time for the ceremony, after all.) He spends the rest of the wedding idly chatting with his coworkers, blinking sometimes so that his gaze doesn’t linger too much on the back of Donghyuck’s head, the only part of him he can see.

Donghyuck catches him right at the end of the group photos, while the grooms are finishing posing for the wedding photobook and everyone else is too busy stalking the cocktail bar to pay attention to them.

“So, we didn’t, you know…”

Mark chokes on his Martini. Donghyuck’s tie is a little crooked again, he must have pulled on it during the ceremony. He never knows what to do with his hands when he’s emotional. He looks stunning in blue.

“Wouldn’t you know if we had?” Mark asks, after he regains his breath. “Like, I’m kinda big and…”

Donghyuck sends him a murderous glare, but shuffles a little closer.

“There are a lot of things that don’t cause pain and could still count as sex.”

Mark shakes his head and chugs the rest of his Martini in one go.

“You know there was no sex, Donghyuck. No matter how drunk you are, you never forget anything. But boy, you were drunk.”

“Taeyong’s bachelor party was amazing. A lot of tequila. Why didn’t you send me back?”

“I was drunk too! For your information, Johnny’s bachelor party was also amazing. I drank a lot and I was already half-asleep, so I was quite unprepared when you knocked at my door.”

“You could’ve walked me back to my room!”

Mark shrugs. He could have. Instead, he just threw away Donghyuck’s fries, chugged what little was left of the tequila down the sink, and tucked Donghyuck in bed with him.

“I wasn’t sure you would stay there. It seemed safer to just put you to sleep.”

“Yes, but now everyone thinks we’ve had sex.”

Well, that might be true. Mark met Jeno a little before the ceremony and the suspicious glare he received from him was kind of difficult to miss.

“Well, we did have sex,” Mark’s mouth says, on autopilot. “Multiple times. In February. Everyone already knew. Or assumed. Jaemin told Jeno and Renjun. Johnny told Taeyong. I told my parents.”

“Wait? You told your parents? Your parents know we fucked in their bedroom?” Donghyuck shakes his head. “That’s… gross?”

“I didn’t tell them we fucked, I guess people just assumed. Just like they’re assuming now.”

“But we didn’t have sex this time,” Donghyuck shriek-whispers.

“Shame on us. At least last time there were rumors but we also had fun. This time we only get the rumors.”

Donghyuck almost pushes Mark into the fountain, then he remembers it’s the reception of his brother’s wedding.

“You’re so insufferable,” he mutters.

“You’re so handsome. Best man, literally and figuratively.”

Donghyuck blushes to the tip of his ears and does push Mark into the fountain, just as Taeyong throws the bouquet and Jeno catches it.

**Fall 2021** ****

In October of the following year, Mark books a flight back to California for Jeno’s own wedding ceremony.

Jeno takes ages to choose his best man, ultimately settling on Renjun. (Eventually, two weeks after sending the invitations, Jeno will get drunk and text Mark saying he chose the best man among his four best friends through a toss-the-coin tournament. Mark will just shake his head and tell him it’s fine and that he’s just happy to be there.)

Everyone feels too awkward to use their old group chat to organize the bachelor party. They never kicked Mark out when he left - they just stopped using it and made a new one without him - and the old group chat stayed there, like the relic of an old ship sinking to the bottom of Mark’s chat list, until he finally changed his phone and lost all his old conversations because he chose not to make a log. Don’t bury the past, just leave it behind, wherever behind might be.

Eight years later, after a few days of awkward back and forth between Renjun, Jaemin, and Mark on one side, and Renjun, Jaemin, and Donghyuck on the other, Renjun has enough of the awkwardness and makes a new group chat, unceremoniously calls it Jeno Bachelor Party, and slams both Mark and Donghyuck in it, alongside himself and Jaemin.

 _No fighting_ , he pins as the notice on top of the chat log.

_let’s start from the most important things. are we getting a stripper or not?_

_man,_ Mark quickly types on the escalator leading him out of the subway station. It’s eight in the evening and he’s almost home from work. It’s still late-ish afternoon in California. Donghyuck will stream soon, so he should hurry. _jane will kill us if we get a stripper. plus we’re all gay except you and jeno here._

Renjun says an audio message saying that that’s exactly the point. It’s Jeno’s bachelor party and he’s het, and Renjun is his best man and he’s also het, so they deserve a stripper.

Jaemin adds that he’s actually bisexual and wouldn’t mind a stripper. Also he’s not afraid of Jane.

Donghyuck replies in something that sounds like a demon invocation but it’s actually just a long keysmash alternated to strings of wheezing emoticons.

Then he says, _we could get male and female strippers. to be fair._

There follows a four minutes discussion between Renjun and Donghyuck that Mark doesn’t really follow, too busy walking home. When he checks his phone again, it’s to the yellow Kakaotalk notification light blinking, the pop-up informing him of thirty-six unread messages in the Jeno Bachelor Party groupchat. The last one is from Donghyuck.

_did you see the wedding invitation? jane and john lol he shouldve chosen a girl with a name a little different from his_

_lol_ , Mark types quickly.

There’s a whole minute of silence when everyone sees his answer and doesn’t say anything. Maybe they’re expecting Donghyuck to throw a tantrum, Mark doesn’t know.

 _it could’ve been worse,_ Jaemin types in the end. _could’ve been jane and jeno. even worse. jane and jean_

Mark cringes remembering Jane’s high school phase of calling Jeno Jean because it sounded French hence more cool. Twelve years, still together. Going strong since high school freshmen year. In a few weeks, Jeno will marry Jane Cooper in her family ranch less than an hour from Heatherfield. They don’t actually live in California anymore, Jeno and Jane, but her family insisted to have her married in her grandparents’ house - which, as far as Mark remembers from that time he and Jeno stayed over, is probably more luxurious than a five star hotel.

Donghyuck writes to him in private just as he enters the elevator in his apartment complex.

_you should at least pretend to be awkward around me or they’ll know something is up_

_donghyuck,_ he replies with a sigh as soon as the door closes at his back. _you’re the only one who thought that wasn’t awkward._

The forced levity, the stubborn attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. Renjun and Jaemin must have thought it was a little awkward too. It’s good that Jeno isn’t actually in his own bachelor party secret group chat, because he would’ve pinpointed the truth immediately. He’s always with his head on the clouds, Jeno, actually the sharpest one. He always knew when something was up between Mark and Donghyuck, when they were fighting, when they made up.

Donghyuck’s stream starts at nine. Mark is already sitting on his couch with a beer in his hand and Indonesian takeout on the coffee table.

Donghyuck is playing an indie platform game and chatting with one of the developers in shared audio about the bugs he finds. It’s a small, small company, he told Mark earlier, they have no money to do proper advertising, _I hope my gameplay helps,_ he concluded. It will, probably, seeing how many people are connected and raving about the game in the comments. It’s the FullSun effect.

FullSun bursts out laughing after a particularly dramatic death. He’s wearing a dark jacket and he pulls it down a little because he’s too hot. Underneath, he’s wearing a mesh top with short sleeves. The chatbox explodes, but Donghyuck doesn’t pay it any attention.

He checks his phone, though, and that makes Mark smirk. Isn’t he fishing for compliments tonight?

 _You look hot,_ he writes only, hesitating a little before he sends the message. He pulls back and watches Donghyuck blush in front of eighty thousand people.

💛

Mark doesn’t remember much of Jeno’s wedding. The yellow leaves looked stunning, Jane looked stunning, Jeno looked stunning. Donghyuck looked stunning, against the porcelain sink of the old colonial-style bathroom, his shirt all bunched up, creasing prettily around his throat, his jacket thrown haphazardly over the towel stand so that Mark could latch onto his bird bones and suck a bruise there.

It must be the champagne, Mark thought. Really good champagne. It made Donghyuck all flirty and brave, a little tease, fingers walking on Mark’s thigh during the ceremony like a curious fairy, brushing his inner thigh in featherlight strokes. He stalked Mark when he went to the toilet, slipped inside with him, crowded him against the door without even locking it.

It’s been almost a year of texting, at least four months of flirting. Toeing the line. Mark is an expert at edging in the bedroom, but Donghyuck is so good at edging him in real life, keeping him right where he wants it, like a tightrope walker, and Donghyuck is only there to shake the rope. Mark remembers a documentary about this French funambulist who set a wire between the Twin Towers and walked on it in the seventies, too high for birds, too low for airplanes. The right height for angels. He was arrested for it. Mark’s head hurts at the thought of being so high up that the ground doesn’t even look real. This is how Donghyuck makes him feel, almost nine years after the first time they touched each other, one year and a half since the last.

“What did you drink?” Donghyuck asks, licking inside his mouth, chasing the taste with his tongue. “You bastard, you’re not drinking champagne like us peasants?”

Mark hoists him up on the basin counter, steps in between his parted legs, licks his lips. Donghyuck tastes like champagne, sweet and bubbly and golden. Mark didn’t drink champagne, but whiskey.

“Grandpa Cooper gave me a taste of forty-year-old whisky,” he answers, stays still as Donghyuck kisses him again, nice and slow this time, trying to find a trace of the taste in his mouth still.

“Jane’s grandfather? Since when are you friends with him?”

Mark laughs, hands sliding down, to Donghyuck’s ass. It fills his palms so nicely. Donghyuck jumps when Mark curls his fingers into the soft flesh, feeling him through the tailored pants. His dress shirt falls down too now that Mark is not keeping it up anymore. He glares at Mark through his freshly dyed hair - a warm blonde he decided on after polling about it on his Instagram page, quite the novelty after at least six months of his natural color. They were styled so nicely, but Mark’s hands messed it all up for him. Now he looks just disheveled and lovely.

“You could’ve shared,” he says, and tries to glare, but the blush sitting high on his cheeks softens him up, makes him look younger than he is.

“Couldn’t have,” Mark answers. “It was a treat just for me.”

The first and last time Mark came here at the Cooper ranch was during the winter of his eighteen years, while Donghyuck was in Nova Scotia for Christmas vacations. Jeno was invited to spend a few days at Jane’s grandparents’ house and his mom asked him to bring Mark too with the promise that he would never leave them alone so that nothing scandalous could happen. Of course, the promise was swiftly broken. By the second day, while the rest of the family was out visiting the neighbors, Mark and Jane’s sister Vanessa had managed to find Grandpa Cooper’s stash of thirty years old whisky and they had drunk half of a bottle between the two of them while Jane and Jeno made out in her room. Grandpa Cooper found them like that when he came back from church, completely cooked, giggling and talking about their university choices, a single, half-empty bottle of five thousand dollars Glenfiddich between them.

Nine, almost ten years later, Jane’s grandfather looks almost the same, maybe even younger.

“It’s the whiskey,” he replied after a barked out laughter, when Mark complimented him on his looks. He recognized Mark as soon as he stepped foot in his ranch and, probably still remembering that time he gave him the scolding of his life for drinking his expensive liquor, he asked him if he wanted a shot.

It tasted even better than the last time.

“This is alcohol for men,” the old man told Mark. “It’s a pity you and Vanessa, that other rascal, drank it when you were kids and you couldn’t appreciate it fully. Come on, drink a little more. You look like you need a little fire on you.”

And fire it gave him. If the champagne made Donghyuck playful, mischievous, like an autumn pixie, the whisky makes Mark burn from the inside, reckless and impatient, fumbling with Donghyuck’s belt to slip a hand in his pants and tug at his cock.

Something tells him that they shouldn’t be doing this, not the day Jeno gets married, but when he tries to vocalize that Donghyuck tells him that this is exactly what happens at weddings.

“People fuck in the bathroom at weddings, Mark, it’s like… tradition!” He’s breathing through his nose, head thrown back, eyes closed. When he opens them to look at Mark they’re all black, the arousal melting the brown into black. “You see people being all happy and married and you want to…”

He bites his lips, and Mark doesn’t know if it’s the friction or a moment of clarity. He knows his own hands feel sweaty, he has to actually hook them on Donghyuck’s thighs to keep him from falling. He knows the pain of Donghyuck sinking his nails in his shoulders when he feels himself sliding down, his legs clamping down around Mark’s thighs. They both moan, and the sound echoes on the porcelain bathtub, the shiny mirror, the decorated tiles of the bathroom.

“Is that what you want? To be happy and married? With me?” Mark asks, when he’s regained his breath, Donghyuck latching onto him even know that there’s not space for falling over. His voice shakes and Donghyuck doesn’t miss it.

“Stupid, stupid Mark,” he whispers, cupping Mark’s face in his hands. “Married? Not at all. Happy? Yes. Yes, I would love to.”

**Fall 2023**

Jaemin doesn’t tell Mark why he’s in New York until they’re cozied up in the corner of the Starbucks across Mark’s office, making the best of Mark’s lunch break.

Jaemin gets himself a monstrosity that is so full of caffeine Mark is surprised it’s not pulling the whole store into, like, a dark hole. Mark orders a seasonal frappuccino. It has these little star sprinkles on top of a drink so sweet it would make even Donghyuck puke. Mark should make him try it.

That’s what he’s thinking, slowly rolling the straw in his drink, when Jaemin drops the bomb.

“So I was thinking of asking you to be my best man.”

Mark freezes.

“What?”

“At my wedding, I mean.”

“What wedding? When wedding? Where wedding?” He pauses, realizing he’s moments away from screaming, “Who wedding?”

Jaemin takes a sip of his Americano, probably taking in more caffeine Mark has ever consumed in his whole life.

“So, remember when I told you that one of the physiotherapists at my hospital went to school with us?”

Mark blinks. He remembers something about a buff physiotherapist who talked too loudly, but Jaemin never told him the name, just that they came from the same high school.

“Kinda? You mentioned it in passing, like, twice?”

Jaemin laughs awkwardly.

“Yeah, I was kinda trying to tell you more but I got nervous and dropped the topic.”

“The topic? The topic that you were dating this… this tall, buff, glorified yoga teacher? And you couldn’t tell me until, what, you’re marrying him?

Jaemin pouts.

“He’s not a yoga teacher. Don’t demean medical professions, Mark. He’s a doctor. He saves lives. Just because he’s not a neurosurgeon or-”

Mark raises his hands in defense, not wanting to upset Jaemin further.

“Okay, I get it, I get it! I’m sorry, I’m just… I don’t know what to say... Where did this come from? You’re marrying this guy and you didn’t tell anyone you were dating him?”

“First, it’s not that I didn’t tell anyone. I told Jeno and Donghyuck. Last week.”

“Donghyuck? You told Donghyuck before you told me?”

“I haven’t told Renjun yet,” Jaemin continues, like he didn’t even hear Mark, “but he’s the next in line. Second, I’m not marrying him. Not... immediately. But like. He hinted at it way too often for me to pretend I still miss it.”

“Wow.”

Jaemin takes another sip of the coffee.

“We’ve been seeing each other for like... well, it was on and off. In the beginning we were just hooking up, you know? It wasn’t that serious. I don’t just call my friends to talk about my fuckbuddies from work.”

“That’s because no one would listen. Jeno is a prude and Renjun is in love with Chicago style references. Well, maybe Donghyuck would have...”

“Yes, sure,” Jaemin says, flashing Mark an amiable smile. “Because I really want to go to the guy who miserably dumped me and tell him I’m begging Lucas Wong for pity sex.”

Mark chokes, coughs miserably and ends up spitting the coffee all over his bagel.

“Lucas Wong? Yukhei? Renjun’s cousin? My friend Lucas?” Jaemin looks at him and shrugs a little. “That... that hypocrite! I tried setting him up with one of my coworkers last week when he came to visit and he said he’s still waiting for the right one!”

That makes Jaemin preen a little. “Well, he hasn’t done any waiting for years at this point, but I appreciate the thought nonetheless. He was supposed to tell you when he came, but he chickened out and he told me I’m your best friend and that he’d tell Renjun if I’d take care of you.”

Mark looks down, takes a napkin and starts dabbing at the coffee that has slowly soaked his sandwich making it inedible. This will be his only lunch until he comes home. To Donghyuck, and the wonderful dinner he will have prepared by raiding Mark’s pantry.

“So you’ve been... going at it for... how long?”

“We fucked around a lot in university, then he graduated and went to Alberta with an internship. And then three years ago he joined our hospital and... yeah.”

“So you’ve been dating for three years?”

“No, well, not immediately, but he wanted to. And so did I. And so we did it. I… I like him.”

“He didn’t tell anything to me,” Mark says, with a pout. “I can’t believe him...”

“Yeah, look who’s talking. I found you fucking Donghyuck in the bathroom at Jeno’s wedding reception after you two spent months pretending to be awkward around each other. Like, straight out lying to our faces. You also fucked before Taeyong’s wedding and completely denied it.”

“Because it didn’t happen-”

“And let’s not even talk about what happened in Vegas.”

Mark rumbles. He hates when Jaemin sounds right even if he’s wrong.

“We’ve only been going out since Jeno’s wedding and we did tell you. Immediately. You’ve had a ten years long forlorn love story with one of my best mates from my school and you didn’t even tell me he was working in the same hospital as you. And neither did he! You’re both canceled.”

“Yeah, well, a lot happened. First you and Donghyuck going xoxo Gossip Girl on us, then Jeno got married, then you and Donghyuck again, then Renjun graduated, then Jane was pregnant, then you and fucking Donghyuck. Again. I mean, the timing never seemed right. But since Lucas started, you know, thinking about it, I thought you needed to know. Even if we won’t marry for, like, well, it’s going to be a long time before we do. But I’m tired of keeping it a secret.”

Jaemin is a little superstitious about good things, always afraid of jinxing them. He’s probably more nervous than he’s letting on, telling Mark.

“Best man you said?” Mark said, finally giving up on his lunch. He will have to get another sandwich on the go because Johnny will have his head if he’s late.

“Yeah, but only because I don’t want my ex to be my best man, and Jeno would probably refuse since Jane is literally dishing out kids at inhuman speed.”

“So I’m like your rebound’s rebound? That’s low, Jaemin, even for you. Why don’t you ask Renjun first so I can really be the last choice?”

Jaemin pays for Mark’s sandwich and then directs him towards the exit. He winks naughtily.

“Oh, Mark, I totally would have. Too bad Lucas already called dibs on him!”

💛

Mark kicks his shoes out when he gets home. He brought takeout, Chinese, because he knows Donghyuck likes to be surprised and because it doesn’t matter if Donghyuck made dinner, they can both eat for three anyway.

The apartment looks even smaller now that it’s so full. On the glass coffee table, Donghyuck has installed two laptops and his favorite portable camera. Not as good as the setup he has at home in Heatherfield, but still very good. He also got Mark a few gaming boxes with improbable names and a Nintendo Switch to play Animal Crossing where he has set up his own second island despite the gift actually being for Mark. Mark doesn’t really mind. He has a tiny house in his (Donghyuck’s second) island, and sometimes they record videos of them playing together and posing in the aquarium that will get posted on Donghyuck Instagram feed and make a lot of girls scream. All is well.

Except nothing is well, because Mark is back with sour-sweet pork, Cantonese rice, and shrimp clouds and all the most improbable American Chinese food he could find at the restaurant, and he knows Donghyuck would love it, but Donghyuck is nowhere to be found.

“Hyuck?” he calls. “I’m home.”

He lays the bag on the other coffee table, the one they bought to be able to eat and not just record Donghyuck’s videos, and takes a look around the house. Light filters under the door of the bedroom, a golden blade. Donghyuck is probably watching a movie in bed, or listening to music. Mark hopes he’s masturbating, because he wouldn’t mind the food getting cold as he joins him.

“You’ll never guess what Jaemin told me. I mean, I guess you can guess since he told you beforehand and, about that, thank you for the heads-up… Hyuck?”

He pushes the door open.

Donghyuck is not on his laptop nor on his phone. He’s not listening to music. Or masturbating, for what it’s worth. He’s simply sitting on the bed, looking outside. The lights are on. When Mark enters, he can’t see his face but only his back.

“Hey baby, is everything all right?” he asks, circling the bed until he is next to Donghyuck.

The gaze he receives is glazed, empty. And no, it says, not everything is all right.

Donghyuck looks up.

“Taeyong called. Mom had a stroke.” He swallows. “She passed away in the ambulance. I don’t know what to do.”

He looks so tiny, sitting on the bed, looking outside the window without really seeing anything. Mark doesn’t know what to do either.

“Taeyong said dad wants to bury her in Heatherfield and asked me if we can have the reception at my house. We should contact a funeral home and talk to the cemetery office. I need to book the flight tickets, what if there’s a delay and I’m late at my mom’s funeral? I also need a ticket for dad… and mom. I don’t know how it works with caskets. Do you think they’ll treat it well? Does it need a special ticket?”

“Donghyuck.”

His hands are shaking.

“And Aunt Hyesung said she wants to come from Korea, but I’m afraid we don’t have enough space at home and…”

“Donghyuck.”

Mark doesn’t want to, but he puts a hand on Donghyuck’s shoulder, finally gaining his attention.

“It’s too late to call the funeral home or the cemetery now. I’ll ask Johnny to look into the flight tickets for your dad, and your mom too, and I’ll check a flight for us, okay? And your aunt, we’ll just book a room for her. And for your dad too, but you need to calm down.”

“A flight for us?”

Mark nods.

“Of course, I’m not going to let you be late at your mom’s funeral by yourself.”

That seems to calm Donghyuck down, a little. Mark pets his hair, brushes Donghyuck’s fringe away from his face.

“You’re a little cold. I’m going to make tea, okay? And you’re going to drink it and then sleep, and tomorrow we’ll deal with everything.”

“The stream, I forgot… I was supposed to…”

“Then take care of that, post a message saying you have family matters to attend to. And after that you’ll drink your tea and go to bed, okay?”

Donghyuck nods. “Only if you come with me.”

“Sure, babe, whatever you need.”

He gets up, but Donghyuck’s hand latches onto his wrist.

“Wait,” he says.

“What is it?”

“Can you… stay for a moment?”

Mark sits down immediately, right next to Donghyuck, their hands barely brushing, until the only lights outside come from the windows of the surrounding palaces.

“I was thinking of visiting her. With you. I haven’t seen her in years. I feel so stupid.” Mark feels Donghyuck sniffle, he sees him cover his eyes. “Why is life like this? Can you please hold me?”

Mark can. And so he does it.

💛

Mark does not remember Donghyuck’s father very well. They met, a few times - he used to come to Heatherfield in summer when he managed to match his vacation with his wife’s, but they would spend that precious week on family trips and visits to relatives and Mark saw little or nothing of him during those times. (Yet they met, and the man remembers him, even if Mark doesn’t.)

Before the funeral, Mark asked Donghyuck what he should expect from his father.

“Very little,” Donghyuck answered, and then added, in a little forlorn tone, “unless you want to be severely disappointed.”

It is no secret that Donghyuck’s parents did not approve of their sons’ lifestyle, his father even more than his mother. They didn’t come to Taeyong’s wedding, and in the past four years Mark spent cultivating a tenuous friendship and then an overwhelming relationship with Donghyuck, the topic of Donghyuck’s father has only been brought up twice. Donghyuck was drunk both times.

Of his mother, Donghyuck talks, sometimes, with the foolish, stubborn melancholy of a child who loved his mom, and a dash of bitterness. “She would’ve accepted it,” he said, once. “Taeyong and I, being gay. I think she would’ve accepted it, eventually. She loved us, after all. But she loved dad too much to disagree with him.”

Mark did not know what to answer. His parents, too, had disapproved in the beginning. His father had thought it was a phase, and his mother had thought Mark was too ashamed of their reaction to come home. But still, despite her attempts to reassure him over the phone, Mark hadn’t come home at all. It took more than one year for them to realize it wasn’t a phase, nor he was ashamed of being gay, he was just afraid to meet Donghyuck. Their reaction, their approval or disapproval, it was all so trivial in front of the giant monster that was, for Mark, Donghyuck - just Donghyuck, always Donghyuck. In time, Mark’s parents had decided to let it go, for Mark had always done whatever he wanted to do, and they had never had any other choice other than to accept it. Mark’s scholarship and his part-time job first, and then his job at the firm, were enough to let him live comfortably on his own without having to rely on them, giving them nothing over him.

But for Donghyuck, it was the opposite. No matter how far he went, how rich or independent or famous, it didn’t matter if he was the one paying the rent and the bills, he would always be the child that made his mother cry. After she moved to Canada, Donghyuck’s visits became sparse and short, dotted by arguments with his father and his mother’s long silences. Until he just stopped visiting.

Now, as he sits next to Mark in the car Johnny rented to take them to Heatherfield for her funeral, Donghyuck looks… defeated.

“Do you think I should’ve tried harder?” he asks, his voice low and only for Mark. Taeyong catches it anyway.

“I think you did what you could. We both did,” he says. Donghyuck shakes his head.

“I should’ve gone, still. I wouldn’t have minded fighting with dad if I had known it was the last time I would be seeing mom. I just… I was such a bad son, wasn’t I?”

It’s somehow ironic how Mark, who was in his childhood and boyhood so dutiful, so wholeheartedly worried about appearances and expectations and commitment, so respectful, had been so quick to let go of his family once he was away from home. Of the two of them, the one who never cared, the one who was ready to go against the flow, to do his own thing, that one had always been Donghyuck. Yet, of the two of them, in the end, Donghyuck was the one who couldn’t let go. He did his own thing, he followed his own path, but his parents’ disapproval followed him everywhere, a regret, a small pain, like a thorn in his side.

“I don’t think you were a bad son, Hyuck,” he says, carefully. “As much as you love them, I think maybe yours weren’t the best of parents.”

“Don’t say that. Mom tried her hardest,” Donghyuck protests, trying to meet Taeyong’s eyes for support, but Taeyong doesn’t answer. He seems unable to.

Of Donghyuck’s mother, Mark remembers the stilted English, the Korean thick on her tongue, the way she would always smell strongly of disinfectant from working at the hospital, one of her butterfly-shaped brooches. She worked a lot, and she was almost never home, but when she was home her sons would always be at her side. They loved her unabashedly and unconditionally, and her disapproval would’ve been - must have been - painful, for both of them. Yet, they couldn’t hate her. Taeyong simply couldn’t just hate anyone. Donghyuck turned all his hate towards his father.

“You’re Lee Minhyung, aren’t you?”

The name is unfamiliar, Mark hasn’t been called Minhyung in so many years. The man talking to Mark after the funeral is even more unfamiliar. Mark doesn’t remember about him, but he remembers about Mark. “You’re Seongguk’s son.”

“That I am. I am also Donghyuck’s boyfriend.”

There’s no one else in the garden. Everyone is inside. Johnny’s parents are here, and Mark’s parents too. A few of Hyeeun’s coworkers from the hospital, some of the Korean ladies of the neighborhood. Donghyuck’s aunt managed to come from Korea, she’s staying at the pension next to the city hall. Donghyuck’s father is staying there too. It wasn’t a big ceremony and it’s not a big reception, because not many people knew Mrs. Lee. Donghyuck was restless the whole time. He didn’t talk to his father, Taeyong did. And now Mark, too.

Donghyuck’s father sits on the new swing Donghyuck has installed in what used to be Mark’s garden. He sits exactly like Donghyuck would, hands in his pocket. They don’t look like each other much, his father resembles Taeyong more, but the attitude... it’s unmistakable.

“Did you say anything, sir?”

“I said I know you’re his boyfriend. He said that... in his videos.”

Mark can’t help the surprised expression that crosses his face.

“Do you watch Donghyuck’s videos?” he asks, politely.

“Hyeeun did. She never missed one. I watched them with her, sometimes.”

“Were they funny?” Mark asks.

The man shakes his head. “I don’t understand a single thing he says. I don’t know much about games. But he seemed... well. He seemed like he was eating well. That’s the only thing she cared about.”

Mark nods. “He’s good at taking care of himself. He even makes sure I eat well.”

Donghyuck’s father nods back and then they just stay in silence. Mark doesn’t know what to say to him. He just lost his wife, so he should give his condolences, maybe, but at the same time, he doesn’t think this man came to him to hear about his dead wife.

“How did you know it was me? Donghyuck’s boyfriend, I mean. He never said my name in his videos.”

The man snorts. “Hyeeun told me. She just knew. Even from the videos, she could tell something had changed. Hyeeun, she... She always knew what was up with our sons. She knew about Taeyong before he knew himself, but Donghyuck... We wanted Donghyuck to get married to a nice lady, get settled, give us some grandchildren. Then he met you, and he never let you go.”

 _I let go of him,_ Mark thinks. _But I came back. I came back._

“I’m glad he didn’t.”

“Of course you are, but I wished he had. Maybe he would’ve been happier, if he had let you go. Maybe we would’ve all been happier.”

He sounds defeated in the same way Donghyuck would. Mark wants to be mean to this man, but he can’t. Not when he sounds so much like the love of his life.

“I didn’t make Donghyuck gay,” he says, only. “He would’ve liked men even if he hadn’t met me. And he’s happy like this. He’s happy with me.”

Donghyuck’s father takes a cigarette out and a lighter out and starts smoking.

Mark resists the urge to chase him outside because Donghyuck hates people smoking in their lawn. It bothers the flowers, his pretty crocs and the sunflowers he planted on the back of the house. Yet, this is Donghyuck’s father and a man who just lost his wife, and as little as Mark cares about propriety and respect, as little as Donghyuck cares about them too, it wouldn’t be fair to cause a mess on the day of Mrs. Lee’s funeral.

The man smokes an entire cigarette and then puts it in a portable ashtray. At least he didn’t leave it on the flowerbed. He looks at Mark with a complicated, unreadable expression.

“I wish he hadn’t met you, but since he’s already like this, I wish you can take care of him. He was very sad when you left that time.”

This is probably the closest Mark will get to some mind of acknowledgement from Donghyuck’s father. He didn’t need it, and Donghyuck wouldn’t want it, but it’s nice to have it anyway.

“I will try, but it’s more likely that he’ll take care of me. He’s quite good at that. At this point, if he ever accepts me, all I can aspire to be is his trophy husband.”

That, at least, makes Chonghyun Lee smile. It summons a long lost memory of summer days in Mark’s mind. Once they all dined together in his home, this house, right after the Lees moved across the street, when Donghyuck was just a name and not the name of Mark’s only love. It was the end of summer, and there were fireflies in the garden, little golden lights among the blooming mums. Mark’s mom and Donghyuck’s mom had made Korean food. Chonghyun Lee had smiled, just like he’s doing now, while praising their cooking.

“I will tell you the truth,” the man continues, “I don’t really understand how he managed to make that much money by playing games.”

“I will tell you the truth, mister,” Mark answers. “I have no idea how he did it either. He has a talent for being surprising, your son.”

Chonghyun nods seriously.

“That he does.” He coughs, awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to take care of him with money. Make him happy. I don’t like that he’s doing immoral things. But if he has to, he should at least be happy.”

Mark almost shakes his head. It’s the most bigoted and insulting father speech he’s ever heard, but it’s… not as bad as Donghyuck thought, maybe.

He straightens his back. “We should come back inside, and you should talk to your son. His mother’s loss hit him quite hard.”

The man nods. “Do you think he’d like to talk to me?”

“He probably doesn’t, but you need to try anyway. It’d make him happy.”

💛

That night, Mark holds onto Donghyuck’s hand as he pulls him in, under the duvet.

He combs through Donghyuck’s hair with his fingers, separating the strands carefully and sweetly. Donghyuck smells like mint and cotton, a combination of mouthwash and that face cream Jane got him for his last birthday. Mark kisses his nose.

“Are you tired?” he asks.

Donghyuck nods.

“I thought funerals were peaceful, somber events, but there was so much to do. At some point, I just wished everyone would leave.”

The guests only left when it was dark, and Donghyuck and Mark were left to clean everything up. Taeyong had promised to help but he and Johnny needed to go back sooner because the babysitter had called saying that the kid was sick. Mark was supposed to go back too because he has to be in the office tomorrow morning, but he stayed anyway.

“I took a day of leave,” he says, softly, right against Donghyuck’s temple. “We should go back to the cemetery tomorrow, just the two of us, if you want. We can bring your mom flowers from your garden. The yellow lilies are in bloom, and the sunflowers too.”

That gets Donghyuck’s attention.

“You’re staying, really?”

Mark bops his nose.

“And leave you like this? You look too sad to be left alone.”

Donghyuck tries to hide a smile.

“I would really like that,” he says, “to visit mom on our own. She hasn’t seen you in so long.”

“So it’s decided. I’ll drive you. Or we could walk.”

“To the cemetery?” Donghyuck asks, with a hint of amusement.

“It’s not that far away, I think I run double that distance every morning.”

“Yeah, and you have all those muscles to prove it, but I don’t. We’ll take the car.”

“We’ll take the car,” Mark repeats, “like His Majesty wants.”

Donghyuck whines and Mark hugs him a little tighter. They roll a little on the bed, like playing puppies. It’s not the right day for doing sexy things, but Mark has learned how much Donghyuck likes to be held, to feel someone next to him, their warmth, their scent. It calms him down.

Mark holds him until they’ve settled, Donghyuck splayed around him, next to him, half over him, one leg thrown haphazardly over Mark’s hips as he waits for sleep to come.

“I talked to your father today,” Mark says, before he forgets. His words are slow, careful, as if gauging the air.

“Yes, I know. I saw you in the garden. I was kind of waiting for you to bring it up.”

Donghyuck sounds a little anxious, a little resigned, but he still leans in when Mark resumes petting his hair.

“He didn’t say anything bad, to be honest. He told me to take care of you. Well, he also told me he would’ve been happier if you had never met me because I do many immoral things to you, but he told me to take care of you.”

“Is he assuming I bottom?”

“Is he wrong?”

Donghyuck snorts. Then sighs.

“Are still you angry at him?” Mark asks, cautiously.

Donghyuck shakes his head, his hair fluffy against Mark’s neck.

“I don’t know. He talked to me too. He said mom watched my videos and was very proud of me. I ran away after that because I was afraid I would start crying, and then who would have taken care of the guests?”

“Taeyong could have.”

“Taeyong has a kid and two dogs to worry about. And you know that he’s still very shaken about mom.”

“Taeyong also has a husband who would do everything for him anyway. You don’t have to take care of everything on your own, Donghyuck. The funeral, the reception. I understand that Taeyong is shaken, but you’re shaken too. You shouldn’t have had to do everything on your own.”

Donghyuck squeezes his hand.

“Dad said... he would like to move back to California.”

“Did he?”

“He was kind of... asking for my permission. I guess he’d feel too lonely in Canada, all alone.”

“And what did you tell him?”

This time Donghyuck’s silence lasts longer and worries Mark a lot more.

“Donghyuck?” he asks.

“I told him I didn’t know.”

Now it’s Mark’s turn to mull over the words. He doesn’t want to offend Donghyuck but maybe spending more time with his father could help him.

“It’s not that I don’t want him here,” Donghyuck says, quickly, when he realizes what Mark must be thinking, that Donghyuck doesn’t want to spend time with his father. “It’s just… Ah, I didn’t want to tell you like this…”

“Tell me what?”

“I… I was thinking of moving to New York with you. So if he wants to stay here to stay close to mom, he can have the house. If he wants to move here to stay close to me, then he should look for a place on the East Coast.”

He swallows and they’re so close Mark feels it against his chest. He pulls Donghyuck up, defying his reluctance to look up. But Mark needs to see him. He needs to know.

“Do you mean that?” he asks. “Coming to New York with me?”

It’s a strange conversation, made more of silence than words, but eventually Donghyuck answers.

“I’ve thought about it. A lot.”

“You hate New York.”

“I love you,” Donghyuck answers, not missing a single beat, and he could’ve won with that alone. “And lately it’s becoming unbearable, to stay here and watch you leave to go back there. It’s becoming unbearable, to watch you stay there every time I leave to come here. I just... I don’t know. We’re over thirty. I feel old. I don’t want to spend my time waiting to meet you again. I just want to stay with you. All the time.”

Mark looks at him, frozen, for a moment, then pushes him away and scrambles down the bed.

“Mark?” Donghyuck calls, but Mark is not listening to him. He kneels on the floor next to his suitcase, picking things from inside and throwing them on the floor.

“Mark what are you doing?”

“Wait, wait.”

Finally, Mark stops, finding the small box tucked inside a pair of rolled-up socks. It’s blue velvet, tinier than he remembered. He’s been carrying it around for three months already, and he didn’t think he’d ever use it any soon. This is all Donghyuck’s fault - Donghyuck, who’s gotten up and crawling to the edge of the bed to peek at Mark. When he sees the box he pales and screeches.

“No, what the fuck Mark, no. I’m in my pajamas, you can’t do this.”

But Mark is already back on the bed, and Donghyuck inches back until his back is against the backboard and Mark is kneeling between his parted legs.

“I can. I can and I will. I am. Try to reject me, Donghyuck. Just try.”

Donghyuck lets out a little chirp of protest, but Mark is already opening the box. It’s true, they’re in old house shirts and sweatpants and so, so tired and it’s been the most emotionally tiring day of the year, Mark can’t believe he’s doing this, yet he’s sure he wouldn’t be able to wait another single minute.

“I’m in love with you. I love you so much I could drop my stupid job and come to live with you in this silly town in the middle of nowhere. I don’t care that half your fans want to kill me and the other half writes porn about us. I don’t care that your father hates me because he’s outraged that I fuck you all night. I don’t care that I hurt you so bad everyone thinks I don’t deserve a chance, I think that too on my own, but I still don’t care. I don’t care about anything but you, Donghyuck Peter Lee. I really fucking want to marry you and spend all my life with you, wherever it is, as long as we’re together. You make me happy and I want to be happy. I want to make you happy. Please be my-”

“Fucking yes, that was so long, yes Mark, yes.”

Donghyuck jumps in his lap, almost knocking the box from Mark’s hands and sending the engagement ring flying, gold and diamonds and everything Mark worked hard to afford, even though he was sure he could’ve given Donghyuck a plastic ring from a Kinder chocolate egg and it would have made him happy anyway.

“I didn’t finish,” he complains, once he’s sure the ring is not going to roll under the bed.

“I don’t need you to finish, it was already too long. Yes. It’s a yes, Mark. Yes. Please ask me again in a fucking restaurant so I can stream it for all my followers to see, but yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

Mark kisses him.

Yes.

They do end up losing the ring under the bed.

> _there’s an ending to the story where the scorpion isn’t eaten by its own vicious hunger. an ending where we both reach the other side of the river undrowned._

**Spring 2024**

Donghyuck’s fans get there first. It didn’t even take them long, just one look at Donghyuck’s shiny new phone with a tiny picture stuck under the clear case - an ID sized pic of two boys making faces at the camera - and Donghyuck talking about moving to New York in one of his infamous tipsy livestreams. Everyone kind of suspected he was seeing someone since the infamous “darling” incident that made numbers in the Full Sun forums a couple of years ago, so they investigated, picked up clues, and put together a tentative timeline.

Renjun finds it first, because Renjun is the kind of evil friend who would look up scandal rumors about his famous best friend. He finds it and sends it to Donghyuck, who just sighs loudly and dramatically and refuses to open the link, so Renjun has no other choice but to send it to Mark too. Mark does open it.

“How the hell did they know about Vegas?” Mark asks, bringing the laptop into the bedroom and unceremoniously dropping it in front of a very sleepy, very cute Donghyuck.

“Please tell me that isn’t Renjun’s link.”

“Look, they even got our anniversary right! Are they psychic? Do they have abilities? How did they even...”

“It’s FSSF, isn’t it? They’re the smartest,” Donghyuck says, with a sigh, letting his body fall back among the pillows in the most dramatic way. “It was very easy to guess we met in Vegas, since I said my ex boyfriend would be there as well, and then a couple of days later I was seen with a ring and someone had the greatest idea to knock at my door calling me darling. So, really, that one is totally on you, _darling_.”

Mark snorts. It was the greatest entry in history and one day he’ll make Donghyuck admit it.

“They got every single date right, they even know when you came to visit me.”

“It’s not hard to notice when I wasn’t in my usual room. Plus I did vlogs every time I came to visit you, so it’s not like I tried to keep it a secret.”

“But how did they know you were visiting me?”

Donghyuck thinks about that for a moment.

“I always said I hated New York because my ex lived there. So I probably needed a very good reason to come here. But I didn’t film any particular video with other Youtubers, plus I was staying at a private house instead of a hotel, so they concluded I was seeing someone here. And they were right. My fans are indeed super smart.”

Mark is inclined to agree. He could really use some of these girls in his office, they’re like hounds, sinking their fang onto the truth and not letting go. From the videos Donghyuck posted they were able to deduce the position of the buildings next to Mark’s house and get a tentative address. One of them caught Donghyuck playing on his Mac in the Starbucks in front of Mark’s office right before Mark came down and saw them kiss. The picture was deleted, but Mark is sure it’s circulating widely in private messages among the users of the blog. It’s a disaster, and also fucking amusing.

“How did Renjun find out about this?” he asks.

“Well, for starters, he’s one of the original members of the forum. He’s basically a founder at this point, and I think some of the admins know he knows me so they might have told him. He’s the one who got the photo removed, by the way. And also, he told me it was really suspicious how in all the fics published in the last two weeks you went from being a white Chad who works in the underground crime scene to an Asian lawyer with a big head. The big head was what convinced him.”

Mark hits Donghyuck, but with no real heat.

“What now?” He asks.

Donghyuck raises an eyebrow.

“I mean, how do we do some damage control Hyuck?”

“We don’t. I’m not a celebrity, I’m just a youtuber. And you’re even less of a celebrity than me. Maybe some gossip site will catch onto the news and publish it, but they can’t publish any photo of you, nor your name, unless they want to be sued, and given who you are I’d say I wouldn’t want to be sued by you.”

“They can still send paparazzi after us, any pic taken in a public place can be published,” considers Mark. When he looks up, Donghyuck is kind of glaring at him but trying not to make it too obvious.

“I don’t think we’re really worth the effort of sending paparazzi after us, Mark. But even if we were, would it be a problem for you? Would it really be that bad to be exposed as my boyfriend?”

Mark closes the laptop quietly.

“No,” he says. “No, it wouldn’t. I’m not ashamed of you, but I’m quite jealous of my privacy. I don’t want some greasy old man to catch me fucking you on the back of my car, or something.”

“Then you better invest in some tinted windows, or something. You know I’m always looking forward to giving people a nice broadcast, but if you’re so prudish I can promise you I will refuse all your advances on me if we’re in the car and wait until we are somewhere more... private, and only then I shall succumb to your... pleasurable attacks.”

There is no discussing with Donghyuck when he is like this, and Mark can already see him palming himself through his slacks. This minx. He really thinks he can make any argument end in sex just because he’s sexy and Mark loves him. Mark is on him even before Donghyuck can send him one of his smug smiles.

> _i know there’s no such thing as forever and summer swallows all of us inevitable, but i’m not ready for this to be the last time i hear your laugh._

**Summer 2024**

The morning after Jaemin’s wedding, Mark wakes up at dawn. It’s a pretty dawn, one of those golden, oversaturated skies that Donghyuck would try to capture with his overpriced iPhone with six cameras or something. Donghyuck is undone on the bed, a lump of blankets, completely naked underneath. (Mark is sure because he was the one who divested him of all his clothes before he unraveled him in any other way.) Only his hair is peeking, messy hair and a sliver of a calf that Mark is quick to cover, least his boyfriend catches a cold.

He leans over, picks up Donghyuck’s phone - Donghyuck would love it if Mark took the picture for him, it’s the kind of thing he loves in his boyfriend - and snaps a quick shot of the sky. It’s pretty, all yellows and oranges and a hint of pink.

That’s when he can’t help but see a message from Richard, Donghyuck’s social media manager, telling him to immediately call him back.

The message is followed by another one saying it’s urgent.

“Donghyuck,” he murmurs. He kinda feels bad, waking Donghyuck up, but he’s also feeling a little antsy.

“Donghyuck, darling, Richard is looking for you.”

“Let him look,” Donghyuck grunts, but lets Mark coax him out of the blankets, sleepy and disgruntled. He calls Richard and Mark can see from the way he immediately wakes up that it was, indeed, something serious. Donghyuck steals a worried look at Mark before he tells him to turn on the laptop.

Mark quickly turns it on and opens the main page, awaiting for instructions, but there’s no need for that. The news feed already gives him the answer he wanted. There, on the first page, spread like a banner for everyone to see, is a picture taken yesterday during the reception of Jaemin’s wedding, Mark and Donghyuck dancing together, kissing under the fairy lights.

Under the picture, naked, unveiled, there’s the whole story. How Mark and Donghyuck met in Heatherfield and attended the same school, even went to prom together. How they recently started living together again. There are pics of them holding hands at Central Park, doing groceries together. He feels livid, his whole life, his _face_ slapped on a website for strangers to prey on.

Donghyuck is considerably paler when he closes the call.

“What did he say?”

“To sue, of course. But the damage is done. Will this be a problem with your work?”

“I doubt any of my coworkers or clients are deep into the gaming Youtube scene, and the boss is dating the last American Voice winner, so, no, I won’t ruin some kind of public image my firm has just because I’m going out with a famous guy. It still annoys me.”

It’s going to be different, Mark realizes, going out and expecting people to take pictures, to be recognized maybe. They’ll have to be more careful from now on.

“Richard said... that it would be better if I introduced you as my boyfriend in a video. I wasn’t sure you wanted to since, you know, you don’t like the camera, but at least it would normalize the thing and maybe people will forget about it and move on and...”

He’s rambling. He’s rambling because he thinks Mark will say no. It was always a staple of their relationship, to keep Mark’s identity anonymous. Donghyuck basks in the fame, and when there’s a controversy he basks in the hate because he doesn’t give a fuck about haters, and they’ll only make him more famous, but Mark is not a celebrity. Mark is a professional lawyer who only recently got a raise and a better position in the strict hierarchy of one of the best law firms in the city, and he doesn’t want to risk it all for some Twitter drama. Donghyuck knows, he knows and he accepts it, and now everything came tumbling down and he’s scared, he’s so scared that Mark will take a step back. Mark takes a step forward, cups Donghyuck’s face in his hands until he stops talking, stops shaking, freezes in his hands.

“Okay,” Mark says. “There’s a nice restaurant a few hours from here. Surrounded by sunflower fields. Super pretty, you’ll be able to take a lot of nice pictures. We could go there and record it and then you can... introduce me to your followers, what do you think?”

Donghyuck blinks. Mark hopes he doesn’t find it too suspicious.

“I guess it could be done,” he mutters. He narrows his eyes - he clearly finds it suspicious. “Would you really be okay with it? You never wanted to appear in any of my videos.”

“I’m already in the news. Once won’t hurt anyone, will it?”

Donghyuck nods. He’s still naked in the middle of the bed. The phone has been thrown back among the sheets. Mark crawls towards him, steals a kiss.

“Come on, Mark, morning breath,” Donghyuck complains, but he kisses Mark back with an eagerness that tastes of relief.

“Are you nervous? Do you think I’ll drop you?”

Donghyuck pauses a little, sighs when Mark sucks on his jugular, relaxing under Mark’s hands.

“It’s just that... We talked about it so many times and you were always against it. I don’t want you to feel like I’m forcing you. I don’t want you to leave because it suddenly gets too much.”

If it gets too much I’ll sue them, Mark thinks, as he kisses Donghyuck’s palm and licks on the inside of his wrist. They’re getting the brunt of my anger, but you, you, my darling, you’re only getting the brunt of my love.

💛

[ Camera zooms on Full Sun, sitting at a nice mahogany table in the middle of a cozy little restaurant. Full Sun clears his voice.

“Ahem, hello sunflowers. Today we’re back with a very special live. To match the mood we’re in Half Moon Bay, to see these late-blooming sunflowers.”

Camera zooms out of the windows, to the sunflower fields bathing in the early afternoon light.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get to the sunflower fields later, I’ve brought old boots and jeans overalls and I even dyed my hair blonde again just to give you the most aesthetics shots that our cameraman here, Sungchan, can shoot.”

The camera nods eagerly.

“But first, there are some things we should probably talk about. Mmh, there has been a lot of speculation about my private life recently. Many of you have asked me if I am seeing someone, many of you have guessed I moved to New York and that I’m not living alone. Some of you have seen me wearing an absolutely unsubtle ring a few years ago and have come to the incorrect conclusion that I was in a serious relationship. I wasn’t back then, but I have been in one for a while. Until now, I have tried to protect my partner’s identity because they were not comfortable with appearing on my videos, but some news outlets revealed some photos of us together so I think it is time I introduce him to you personally. Mark, meet my followers. Followers, meet Mark.”

Camera slowly moves back as a nice young man enters the frame and sits right next to Full Sun. He’s wearing a suit and his necktie is a little too tight. He looks a little nervous and keeps stealing wide-eyed glances at the camera.

“Hello everyone,” he says - croaks - “I am this gorgeous man’s boyfriend.”

Camera zooms on Full Sun’s vicious blush and barely noticeable smug smile.

Full Sun tries to regain his composure by looking at the tablet open in front of him.

“Wow, there are so many questions. Do you want to try and answer some?” he asks Mark.

“Let me see,” Mark says, eyes widening when he sees how fast the comments are flowing. “Wow, they really are curious. I’m a Leo. I’m only a little older than Donghyuck here,” he says, answering some of the questions. “I don’t call him Peter, it would be so strange. But he calls me Mark and we don’t find it strange. No, I don’t really work with video editing. I’m very bad at it. I guess that’s our Sungchan’s work,” he says, flashing a thumb-up at the man behind the camera. The camera shakes.

“Is it true Donghyuck and I dated in high school? Yes, it’s true. Am I...”

Mark frowns, and Donghyuck steals the tablet from him to read the comment.

“Yes, he is the infamous ex. Not an ex anymore. Not ever again, if I can help it.” He pauses for a second. “They’re asking if you feel like my trophy boyfriend.”

That makes Mark laugh. “I have a good job, you know, but yeah, sometimes I do feel like Donghyuck is too right for me. Then I see how stingy he is with the toothpaste and I remember he’s just my best friend from high school. How long have we dated? Two years? A little less than two years?”

“Two years, yeah,” confirms Donghyuck.

“Do you love him?” reads Mark, and Donghyuck hisses loudly next to him.

“No reading embarrassing questions!” he cries.

“Are you embarrassed by the thought that I could say I love you here, on-air? Where you can’t edit it out?”

Camera shakes like the cameraman is giggling. Full Sun glares at the cameraman and then at the boyfriend.

Waiter comes in, brings two flutes of champagne. Full Sun is super red and immediately grabs one and starts drinking to soothe the redness sitting high in his cheekbones. He chokes on alcohol. The camera falls on the side, but it still keeps recording as both cameraman and boyfriend come to hold him as he coughs, coughs, and coughs, until he finally coughs out something shiny and covered in spit.

Full Sun looks at the shiny object, horrified, then at the boyfriend, then at the cameraman, who’s quickly coming back behind the camera to pull it up and record the entire moment for posterity.

“Where did you find it?” Full Sun asks, then, in a shrill, panicked voice, “Oh no, no Mark Lee, absolutely no! Sungchan, close the camera, close the camera or you’re fired, I swear, turn it off.”

The camera is turned off right as the boyfriend gets on one knee, the spitted-out ring in his open palm. It’s impossible to hear what he’s saying, but it’s also easy to imagine.

This video will later be posted on Full Sun’s channel, properly edited, with the title: “Boyfriend proposes during his first and last live with me.” Tagline: “I say yes, but none of you will get to see it.”

They will marry next summer - in Las Vegas - and they will be, after all, happy. ]

> _today there’s sunlight through curtains that can’t rival the warmth of your name._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really wanted to include their own wedding too in the end but there's already been four weddings in this fic so I gave up. But, like I said, I quite like the ending. I don't know how many of you will like it, but I like it.  
> Thank you for reading, do let me know if you liked it and please anticipate my next project once the semester finally ends.  
> Always stay safe <3

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it leave a kudos or a comment <3 Thank you for reading!


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